


Daybreakers

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: Adam (2009), Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Betrayal, Bodyguard AU, Bottom Nigel, Edging, Fondling, Guns, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Intrigue, Kidnapping, M/M, Oral Sex, Past Drug Use, Possessiveness, Protectiveness, Violence, badass Adam, clever as shit Nigel, you read that right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:45:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 53,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Look, kid -”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“I’m not a kid,” the other says. “I’m not your kid. Or son. Or boy. I am potentially your employer and not impressed, at the moment.”</i>
</p><p>Adam's work is not strictly speaking legal. Who is Nigel to judge?</p><p>A Spacedogs Bodyguard AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to [noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/) for being our amazing, invaluable, incredible beta on yet another brainchild of ours! Bby we could not do this without you!
> 
> And an ENORMOUS thank you to the lovely [Leon](http://skullfricked.tumblr.com/) for their gorgeous art!!

  
  
Art by the incredible [Leon](http://skullfricked.tumblr.com/)

\---

Through the wavering lines that unseat the room around him, he wonders if he should dress for the occasion.

A hand against the wall grounds him in the reality of that wall, at least. He can’t vouch for the rest of them, traitorous things with ill-balanced beams and uneven floors, but this one, gripped so hard his knuckles turn white - this one is sound. A curt cough erupts before he can catch it in his fist, as the assemblage of his clothes are laid before him.

He grabs the shirt with the doggies on it and mutters a negligent curse as he shoves his arms through the sleeves.

To Nigel’s credit, he remembers to brush his teeth. A scolding, towards himself, that his mouth tastes like shit and probably smells worse, replete with old liquor and older cigarettes and fuck knows what else. Eyes narrowed at his own reflection, he crams the toothbrush against his teeth and squints harder.

He wonders if he should shave.

No.

Fuck that, too. He’d probably slip on a wave of nausea and cut his fucking throat open.

Twisting his feet into his shoes, he pats the pockets of his trousers. The room card is lodged in the back pocket, some survival mechanism cued in when he nearly battered the door down the night before and reactively returned the keycard to his pocket after finding it there. His burner is there, junky piece of shit, sitting heavy in his front pocket. Spanning his hands up his silken shirt, Nigel hisses a sharp _fuck_ as the sun blazes in through the thick scarlet curtains in front of the windows.

Cigarettes.

Where the _fuck_ are his cigarettes.

By the time he realizes he doesn’t fucking have any, the room is upturned. He doesn’t give a fuck about the hangover hammering in time with his pulse and slowly curling up his throat. Hell, he doesn’t give a fuck about being late for this meeting, because it’s not going to fucking happen if he doesn’t have smokes with him.

In Nigel’s mind, he sees a flash of skin, trapped full and flush beneath a spandex halter top. Stars and stripes, like a fucking flag of flesh, dark hair spun across his face as she plucked a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt and made him hold it between his lips as she lit it for herself. Again and again. And fucking again.

He is definitely going to be late to this _fucking_ meeting.

The door bangs shut loud enough to make Nigel’s stomach heave. He fishes his wallet out of his pocket at the corner store, beside the fucking keycard that he secures inside it and knows he’ll goddamn forget about when he staggers back to the room later. Two packs, the fucking red ones, one shoved to his back pocket and the other to the front of his shirt.

Only then does he find a cab driver - agonizingly early on a Sunday goddamn morning - to bring him to the West Village.

Even at the asscrack of dawn on Sunday there’s goddamn traffic. Nigel hardly gives a shit, head out the window and cigarette between his lips. He doesn’t bother to ash it, it falls off on its own as they drive and even a little fucking air gets to Nigel’s forehead to cool it. The sun keeps stabbing goddamn ice picks into his eyes and he curses, losing his half-smoked cigarette somewhere on the edge of Central Park.

On and on and fucking on until the building they pull up near is enough to make Nigel want to get right back in again.

He’s worked for people like this before, rich bored kids who want someone stalked or scared or fucked for an infidelity case. He doesn’t really give a fuck - they pay up well enough - stupid, but never stupid enough to deny Nigel his paycheck once he’s finished what they fucking want him to do.

But he doesn’t have the brain capacity to deal with some snot-nosed asshole with daddy’s black card telling him he wants to be treated like a proper paying client.

Fuck it.

He goes in anyway. At worst he’ll punch a door. At best he’ll get paid to punch something else.

The door is not particularly extraordinary, hardly even secure, considering the building it’s in, but regardless, Nigel shoves his fist against it once, twice, in a semblance of a knock, and puts another cigarette between his lips to light it.

The door is opened almost immediately by someone who looks barely out of high school, let alone matching the eloquence of the email sent Nigel's way a week before. He could barely fucking read it trying to translate it to layman’s terms, this kid could hardly have written it, dressed in his frumpy grandpa sweater and corduroys and proper little shoes. He looks like he went through his dad’s closet to look for something to make him seem more grown-up, and landed way out in the other end of the park with the attempt.

“You’re late,” the kid says, tone clipped, and expression far from impressed as he looks at Nigel. “You might as well go home.”

Nigel tugs the cigarette from his lips, mouth wide as he exhales the smoke to the ceiling, at least, and not the expansive condo he can see before him.

“Traffic,” he says. “Left an hour ago, fucking cabbie -”

“From?”

Arching a brow, Nigel meets the sharp blue eyes before him - like the sky above the beach on a cloudless summer day - that in turn, avoid his own. Just by an inch or so, just past his head. Close, but no contact.

“The Bronx,” he says, before dropping his arm to check his watch. Forty minutes late. Fuck.

“It hardly matters if the city was closed down, you’re late. You shouldn’t be late. You read the job description.”

Nigel just blinks at him, one eye then the other, before peeling his lips apart to set the cigarette between once more.

“Look, kid -”

“I’m not a kid,” the other says. “I’m not your kid. Or son. Or boy. I am potentially your employer and not impressed, at the moment.”

Nigel breathes a laugh, unfurling smoke that billows thick as he sighs. He’s fucking exhausted, burned out from too much booze and not enough cocaine to outweigh it. Wiped from taking back to the hotel not one girl from the club but two that he had to shoo out when he woke up before dawn to take a piss. He’s tired. Genuinely fucking tired, and possibly getting too old for this shit.

But he can damn well work a job, and sure as shit anything a spoiled kid like this requires.

“Darling,” Nigel sighs. “You’ve not even spoken with me beyond scolding me for a shit fucking cab driver who wanted to take me for a ride. At least give me a proper fucking interview. That was the word you used, yeah? A ‘job interview’. I’d give you a list of references but it’d be breach of fucking confidence, wouldn’t it?”

The - Nigel doesn’t even know what the fuck to call him now - young man just watches Nigel a moment more before shoving the door further open and stepping aside.

“Put out your cigarette please, I don’t like how they smell, and the smell will linger already when we talk,” he says. 

“I’m not your darling,” he adds, before turning to walk deeper into his apartment, confident that Nigel will follow behind. In truth, he doesn’t have much choice beyond following the kid or leaving him with the door open. But rich kids are easy work, and easy work is easy money, and easy money means more coke to drown out the exhaustion that now gnaws at his very bones.

Fuck it.

He tosses the cigarette, deliberately uncaring, on the landing, and follows him inside.

The space is - by New York City standards - enormous. Nigel’s long-stay hotel room could fit inside it three times and still leave spare space. Exposed brick and hardwood floors. Pressed tin ceiling in floral patterns and a balcony overlooking a street lined with trees. A fucking balcony, and he doesn’t figure the kid - no, the young man - as a day over twenty-two.

God, Nigel can’t _stand_ rich brats like this.

He narrows his eyes in the facsimile of a smile and waits, standing, as his potential employer takes a seat in his computer chair, at a desk that holds several screens and a keyboard neatly centered.

Nigel stands. Still. He stands. And he waits, as the kid - fuck - the young man takes him in with glancing looks that never hold longer than an instant.

Finally, forcing his tone to one of peaceful neutrality, Nigel asks, “Can I sit?”

“No, a lot of your job will require standing,” the boy replies, before raising his eyes again. “I won’t keep you long anyway. You’ve come highly recommended, I’ve followed you through news stories and forums. I’ll use the name you choose for jobs, then, shall I? Nigel?”

The other narrows his eyes.

“You can call me Adam. Easy enough to remember without needing to come up with a monosyllabic hypocoristic to describe me.” Adam types something quickly before directing his voice at Nigel again, not looking up at all, as though the other doesn’t even matter. It’s strange that of all the prissy brats that have had Nigel do their dirty work for them, for the first time he genuinely feels like he gives a shit what the kid - young man - _Adam_ \- thinks of him.

Fuck it.

Fuck all of it.

“Primarily I need you to be my bodyguard,” Adam says. “I worry that some of my movements through the dark net might have been traced due to a technical error and there are several corporations I would rather not have invading my home.”

“Corporations,” Nigel repeats, regretting it as soon as Adam’s brows lift. “Right.”

To his credit, Adam’s telling Nigel more than he wagered he would. In fact, the whole story is more than he thought it would be. Anticipating _go bust out the windows in their Beamer_ or _put him in the hospital_ , this is a far cry from anything Nigel expected to hear on a ping to this part of the city. Hell, for that matter, he hadn’t expected his potential employer to bring him to his home.

Nigel lifts his gaze from the boy - yes, boy - sitting opposite him. The bedroom is shuttered by sliding doors, but with a flat that takes up at least half of the ground floor, he can assume the general layout. Drawing a breath, he swallows down his rising gorge as a glimmer of nausea unsettles his tracking, and he looks back to Adam.

“You don’t have any locks on your windows,” he says. “The bedroom overlooks the corner, which is a fucking problem if someone wants to come in and take something - they’ve got two exits then, by car, heading east and north. This one,” Nigel says, jerking his head towards the balcony and immediately regretting the motion, “is trickier for an escape, but optimal for tossing down whatever of your fucking equipment they want to someone else. Your front door’s fine - you could use a couple more locks just for fucking peace of mind - but you’ve got a buzzer on the big fucking metal one coming in so that helps.”

Adam turns to look, taking in his home with this new information in mind, and apparently taking his damn time to comprehend simple things as _lock your fucking windows, you’ll be fine_.

“I can offer a down payment monthly,” Adam says finally, turning back to his computer, pulling up a calculator from the top drawer of his ridiculously over-organized desk and punching in something Nigel can’t see. “To cover travel expenses and accommodation for wherever you are. For time spent. Higher on months where there is a possibility of bodily harm in your line of work or if I need you longer than set hours. But we can start with five and a half.”

Nigel’s lips part around his tongue, then thin to a line. God knows he’s not one to look a fucking gift horse in the mouth at this point, but he asks anyway, “Hundred?”

Adam blinks.

“Thousand.”

It’s enough to pull Nigel’s throat tight enough to choke him. He channels it into a ready morning cough, dense and painful, trapped behind his fist. Humming as the tension eases, he drops his hand and folds his arms. He knows he should say yes. He can’t think of many things in the fucking world he wouldn’t do to have steady income like that, but neither can he think of many things in the fucking world that a kid like this could do to have that ready to spend.

“Set hours,” Nigel says.

“I’ll need you here at night, occasionally days but I’ll let you know in advance.”

“From?”

“When I sleep until the time I wake up.”

Nigel nearly grins at the simplicity of it. Instead, he creases his brow. “And you’ll know in fucking advance if there’s a chance of bodily harm,” he snorts.

“Certain jobs are higher risk than others,” Adam replies. For the cleverness that catches the light in his eyes, he’s fucking blase about it and Nigel’s eyes narrow a little.

“I don’t need to know what you do. Better if I fucking don’t,” he says, flat, without enough energy in him - between the hangover and the elation at a job that pays so well - to manifest anything more. “There’s not much I won’t fucking do, but I won’t work with someone who trafficks - women, kids. Even fucking pictures of kids. So if that’s where you make your money -”

“That’s revolting,” Adam replies quietly, and the way his brows furrow, his lips purse, it’s easy enough to see that it’s hardly an act. That, at least, is a fucking relief, knowing that the kid doesn’t deal in other kids, or women, or people in general. There is little Nigel finds more detestable. 

“I play with machines and their coding. I don’t understand people and I don’t want to,” Adam adds, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He looks past Nigel and then at him again, as close to ‘at’ him as the kid can, Nigel supposes. He wonders, absently, why that is, but hell if he’ll ask. “Payment can be made through a bank transfer or in cash, it’s your choice. I would suggest cash, because any transfer electronically can be tracked, no matter how I shuffle up the lines through which it comes.”

Nigel’s jaw works.

It sounds too good to be fucking true. Finds Nigel’s name through hire on one of those fucking onion sites - fuck if Nigel knows how that works but he knows it’s there - and contacts him. Probably a few others as well. Nigel manages to impress him despite showing up late and miserably hungover by doing little more than pointing out the weak points in his fancy-ass apartment. Offer comes quick at five plus grand a month to sit on his ass while the kid sleeps and make sure nobody shows up who shouldn’t be there.

Far too good to be fucking true.

He tries to meet Adam’s eyes and finds his gaze avoided, not in deceit but in an awkwardness that tugs at some withered thread of sympathy in Nigel’s chest. So maybe that’s what it is, he considers. That he didn’t balk at Adam’s weirdness, that he - quite frankly - doesn’t give a flying fuck about it. That a job’s a job even if it is for some spoiled whiz-kid hacker playing games with corporations’ security networks.

None of that concerns him in the fucking slightest.

And that could be what’s made all the difference.

“Month to month,” Nigel agrees. “Payment on the first for the remaining days. Cash.”

"Good," Adam says, shoulders relaxing from whatever tension he held them in before this. He turns back to his screen again, and Nigel wonders how long he will have to wait this time before Adam remembers that he fucking exists.

"From tomorrow until the end of the month I will pay you $1065. It should cover the last six days before we fall into September, and then we will start with our terms as set previously." Adam looks up and then stands, walking past Nigel to get something from the kitchen, predictably not offering Nigel anything.

"I don't keep contracts on paper. As much as possible, all transactions and conversations are to remain verbal or physical only. If there is no trace, there is no evidence, without evidence there is nothing to back up a lawsuit should one arise."

"You’ve done this a fucking lot, huh."

"Since I was fourteen," Adam confirms, returning to his computer once more and fidgeting with his hands. "Of course, with no evidence there is also nothing stopping you from betraying me to a higher bidder, so in the interest of full disclosure I will tell you now that should an offer become too tempting, you will find yourself at once revealed and wiped. No money or passports or safehouses. All your aliases will be sent to the appropriately interested parties and your reputation in this business sullied and eradicated entirely. That is the worst case scenario, of course," he says.

“Implying that you already have all that information on me,” Nigel asks, brow lifting.

“Telling you. I am telling you that I do. Full disclosure,” Adam says again, and Nigel swears he sees the kid smile but it’s so fast that he can’t be certain.

“Threats are a hell of a way to start a business relationship. What’s the best case scenario?”

“You aren’t approached.”

“Fuck off,” Nigel laughs, folding his arms. “You know what I mean.”

Adam twitches, a little, every time Nigel swears. A bare motion of shadow beneath his eyes, a movement of his nose, wrinkling. Almost a flinch but subtler than that, clear enough to show his displeasure but a reflex, unintentional.

“If you are actually approached, by a significant entity with a serious offer, it would benefit you to tell me who and how much,” Adam says. “Once I know where the solicitations are coming from, I’ll be better able to dissuade them from doing so again in the future. And give you a counter-offer. Though by that point -”

“An afterthought,” Nigel says, not without a crooked smile that draws up his eyes. “Fucking severance pay while you fuck up the rest of my life.”

Another little flinch. “Something like that. Do you always swear so much?”

“Are you always so fucking twitchy?”

“It makes you sound ignorant,” Adam says. “And it concerns me that you’re so concerned about what happens if you sell me out.”

“Making sure I know how you want me to keep my nose clean,” Nigel shrugs, with a pointed sniff that still tastes bitter on the back of his tongue. Speaking of keeping his nose fucking clean.

“Look,” Nigel says. “I’ve got no interest in talking to most people in the fucking world, Adam. I don’t give a fuck about computers. If anyone got to me, I’m the perfect fucking know-nothing, and there’s a good fucking chance they’d end up with their faces smashed in. You want me to watch you sleep? Fine. You want me to keep your shit safe while you do? Done. You want me to go break some other kid’s shit for you? No problem.”

Five grand a month, plus expenses, to babysit a grumpy kid.

Fucking _done_.

Nigel loosens his arms and steps forward, extending a hand with silver glinting on a small chain around his wrist. He can’t say he’s not pleased with the prospect. Charmed, even, by the bald-faced lack of bullshittery in the kid hiring him. But he didn’t come at Nigel with the usual ridiculous assertions of masculine dominance, big fuckin’ shoulders and sharp looks like Nigel typically gets to _put him in his place_. Only a cool authority, no-nonsense and self-assured, despite the posture that says anything but.

He clears his throat, after a minute passes, hand still extended.

Adam watches him a moment more, a study, though his eyes barely move from where they’ve settled. Nigel feels strangely like he’s being scanned, and sets the thought away. He doesn’t need to find himself in uncanny valley on top of the rest of this shit. At length, he starts to lower his hand and Adam blinks, as though broken from a trance, and shakes his head. Then he stands and comes closer to Nigel, still not taking his hand but offering an alternative by just standing there.

Then he nods.

“Tomorrow then,” Adam says. “I sleep at 10PM unless I have a project running and so far all are working on their own without supervision. I wake at 7AM, I never sleep in. If you want, bring food with you for the shift. Do not order take-out. Do not leave the house half-way through the shift to buy something. You can use the kitchen if you promise to clean it up after. If you don’t, I won’t let you use it anymore.”

It is only through whatever dredges of restraint still malinger in Nigel that he resists a _yes, mother_ and instead just traces his teeth with his tongue beneath his lips. A stiff nod is the most he can manage, imagining a fucking bag lunch in hand as he shows up for his night shift like a common fucking rent-a-cop. The insult eases a little when he reminds himself that rent-a-cops don’t get paid like this, and certainly not to sit around on a couch.

“Smoking?”

“Balcony,” Adam says. “If you must. I’d prefer you didn’t but since you seem to be addicted, I’d rather that than the effects of withdrawals distracting you.”

Nigel swallows a curse, and with vestigial politeness, inclines his head to his new employer.

“The balcony then,” he agrees.

“Okay,” Adam says, nods back, and returns to his computer. “I will pay you in the morning,” he adds. “I have had people take the money and never show up. A bad decision, but money is instrumental in people making bad decisions.” Adam looks away, Nigel’s dismissal evident in Adam’s immediate submersion back into his work. Nigel sighs another curse, turns on his heel to go, and Adam sits up again.

“And don’t think that you can try something,” he says. “I sleep with a gun under my pillow and I know how to use it.”

Nigel blinks, hand against the door. He can’t imagine what’s got a kid like this so fucked up that he’d find himself a gun in New York City. In truth, he doesn’t want to know. There’s a lot of things Nigel doesn’t want to know about this - he learned a long fucking time ago that the less questions you ask to the paranoid, the less rope you give them to hang you with later.

“Lock your door,” Nigel tells him, as Adam lifts his head from his work. “I’m going to bring over a couple more to install for you.”

And with that, he goes, but only so far as the corner of the hallway. There he waits, listens for the snap of metal back into place, and when Adam’s footsteps creak back into his apartment, Nigel is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Fucking decades ago, before Nigel dropped out of school, they read a story about knights sworn to protect - well. It was a fucking princess, and that’s sure as hell not what Nigel’s looking at now. But he thinks of the knights anyway, himself as one, brave and stalwart. Shining armor and all that shit. It lasts for just that long before he reminds himself that he’s hired muscle with a porno magazine in his hand and a kid paying him to sit there and make sure no one looks up at his windows for too long._
> 
> _Real fuckin’ noble._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Adam doesn’t look up for the first knock. Nor the second. He looks up when the door damn near rattles off its hinges with the force of the third knock. For a moment, he just stares, adrenaline shooting through his system and he wonders if he can get to his gun in time or if he will have to sacrifice a computer screen to use as a shield.

“Adam.”

Adam shudders out a breath, turning his eyes to the clock to see it barely ticking past 9PM. He frowns. Nigel is early. He’s early by an hour. An hour Adam could spend working. He waits a moment more before pushing himself to stand and making his way to the door to unlock it.

Nigel is hardly dressed better than the day before, but at least he looks less like he’s about to fall face first into the floor with a hangover from hell. Adam blinks at him, raises an eyebrow.

“You’re early.”

He’s got a bag from the corner store in his hand, a magazine in the other. With a dry look to Adam, he steps in, forced to edge by against the doorframe when Adam doesn’t move, and he toes off his shoes.

“Owed you forty fucking minutes, didn’t I? From last time.”

“Now there’s twenty extra.”

Nigel lifts his eyes, stuck in one shoe and holding his foot aloft to unlace it properly. “Twenty -”

“Extra minutes. You’re here an hour early, not forty. I’m not paying more for that.”

“Not exactly on hourly fucking wages to begin with, am I, dar- ” Nigel begins, before he stops himself. “It was a joke.”

“But you’re still early.”

“I had to find a fucking corner store and buy things, didn’t know if I’d have to go to another for the right brand so I left extra time.”

Adam tilts his head, still holding the door open.

“The right brand of cigarettes,” Nigel explains, before cutting himself short. “You want me to wait in the fucking hallway or what, Adam?”

Adam considers this for a moment as a genuine question before sighing and closing the door. No, he won’t have him waiting in the hallway. No, he won’t attract the attention of his entirely normal and upper class neighbors by having Nigel being Nigel on the landing.

“I have things to do,” Adam tells him. “I didn’t expect you to be here so I planned them for the evening.”

“I could just sit on the couch,” Nigel points out, and Adam sighs again, doesn’t bother to explain to him how it is hardly the fact that Nigel would be in the way so much as he would be there, present, at all.

“Okay. Don’t touch anything.” Nigel just snorts, and Adam gives him a dry look. “Some of the equipment is sensitive and shouldn’t be moved, even if it looks harmless. Others are not yet fixed and might spark. If I thought you were going to steal anything, you would have done it already and I would have reported you already.” He shrugs and returns, tense, to his computer, mumbling, “I just don’t want my bodyguard electrocuted on his first day for touching something he wasn’t meant to touch.”

Bodyguard. That’s got a ring to it that Nigel likes, and he mouths the word silently as he takes a slow seat on the couch. It sounds classy - much better than _goon_ or _thug_ or _hooligan_. Fucking decades ago, before Nigel dropped out of school, they read a story about knights sworn to protect - well. It was a fucking princess, and that’s sure as hell not what Nigel’s looking at now. But he thinks of the knights anyway, himself as one, brave and stalwart. Shining armor and all that shit. It lasts for just that long before he reminds himself that he’s hired muscle with a porno magazine in his hand and a kid paying him to sit there and make sure no one looks up at his windows for too long.

Real fuckin’ noble.

“You said I can -” His ward - there’s a good fucking word - startles violently and Nigel lifts a hand in peace. “You said I can use the kitchen. Can I use the coffee maker?”

Adam swallows, turns away to continue working.

“I don’t have a coffee maker,” he says. Nigel just blinks at him.

“You fucking what?”

“I don’t like coffee. I don’t have a coffee maker. So you can’t use it.”

The logic is infuriating but sound. Nigel allows a few moments of chewing his own lips to masticate the curse words that roil within before he manages something more civilized.

“Can I bring coffee?”

“I don’t like coffee.”

“For myself. Can I bring coffee for myself, Adam, fuck.”

Adam blinks up at him again and frowns. He doesn’t like the distraction, doesn’t like the fact that someone is talking to him so much, or swearing, or going to be smoking on his balcony, or anything at all relating to this entire situation. But he needs him. Otherwise Nigel wouldn’t be here. He swallows.

“You can bring coffee for yourself.”

“Fantastic,” Nigel declares, but the thought of actually going out to get coffee, reminding Adam to lock the door, coming back in, doing all of this again - it’s not fucking worth it. Next time he will. For now he stands, reading material tossed aside to the couch, and he takes up the plastic bag he brought in. Bottle of water - can’t trust fucking New York tap - and some chips. Two packs of cigarettes to last the night. A fresh lighter in case his shits out because he’s fucking certain Adam won’t have one.

He takes up three packages after that, metal jingling within, and regards Adam.

“Need your screwdriver,” he says, as Adam continues typing. “I got a security guard for the door and two other locks. Have to be a fucking idiot to try to take down a door that heavy but most people aren’t very fucking smart to begin with so -”

More clicking. A steady rapport of fingers over keys, and Adam so close to the screen that it gives Nigel a fucking headache just to see it.

“Adam.”

Fucking clicking.

Nigel draws a breath but holds it. He holds it until his chest hurts and then, muffling the locks against his hand, he sits back to the couch again, and doesn’t disrupt.

For half an hour, Adam keeps typing, doesn’t stand, doesn’t move, barely makes a sound beyond slow steady breathing. And then, as though on some frightening clockwork schedule, at exactly half past, Adam turns his computer off and gets up.

“I am going to take a shower,” he says, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. “And then I’m going to go to bed.” He lets his eyes linger on the locks still in Nigel’s hands and swallows. “I think there’s a screwdriver in the guest bathroom under the sink in the little toolbox. I don’t know if it’s any good, I’ve never used it.”

“Right.”

Adam nods again, hand up to cup his elbow as he looks over Nigel, over the main room, down the corridor where the spare room and guest bathroom are. Then he turns back to his computers, back to the door that leads to his bedroom suite.

“I’m going to -”

“Take a shower,” NIgel prompts, and Adam nods.

“Take a shower.”

And with that he goes, decisive steps to the bedroom and a deliberate click of the door to close it behind him. Nigel releases a long, groaning sigh that in it carries every _fuck_ and _goddammit_ he trapped behind his teeth. A few made it out before, plenty didn’t, and he holds out the sound, grinding his palms into his eyes until he’s out of breath entirely. This isn’t hard. None of this is hard. He just can’t make heads or fucking tails of the kid or his resentment, aimed at Nigel but clearly not his fucking doing.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t fucking matter.

He decides to leave his half-assed dinner in the bodega bag when he sees how neat Adam’s kitchen is. Containers for flour, sugar, all that shit arranged in order from biggest to smallest. A single dish washed and set aside in the rack, itself spotless. The kid’s a fucking neurotic. He’s paranoid. And yet neither of those excuses seem at all sufficient for the weird intangible shape that Nigel feels when he thinks of him. He can’t even find the words for the color of it, somewhere between a vibrant blue and a pale green, somehow both all at once.

It _really_ doesn’t fucking matter.

So he goes to find the fucking screwdriver instead. The guest room smells like it hasn’t seen movement in months, shades drawn against the streetlights outside. In the bathroom, he finds the box - there’s dust on top and a peeling label written on masking tape that reads RAKI in black marker. Thank fuck there’s a proper set of tools inside, though he’ll be shocked if they still work. He finds a plug in the living room to start charging the screwdriver, seeking out the right bit for it as he hears the shower shut off.

Within the room are usual sounds of movement, a towel tossed down with a whisper of fabric, the clicking of damp feet against the tile before that becomes a gentle hush of toes against the carpet. Nigel listens and he doesn’t. He hardly cares what the kid’s doing in there. He could be wanking off for all he cares and Nigel would still not do anything about it beyond maybe picking up his magazine and joining him.

Bonding rituals and all that shit.

Nigel snorts, wondering if Adam even knows how to fucking jerk off properly.

There’s a little sound beyond the door but nothing worrying, the end of a yawn, the tug of his voice drawn high before he sighs and pads close to the door again. When it opens, Adam is there in a baggy shirt and too-long sleep pants just bunched up above his toes.

“What are you doing?” he asks, but his tone has lost the sharpness of when he had greeted Nigel, and the day before. He sounds almost his age, now, whatever that is.

“Charging the screwdriver,” Nigel answers, taking in the slip of collar a little loose against Adam’s shoulder, the shirt well-worn and soft against him. His hair is drying wild, soft curls standing every which way, falling into half-lidded eyes. Less snarling shut-in and more… well. Probably how he really is when he doesn’t have Nigel bashing around making noise.

He turns his attention back to the locks. “And making sure all the pieces are there. Not going to do it when you’re going to bed, makes a fucking racket against wood this solid and the neighbors would shit. I’ll do it in the morning before I go. One’s got a key, the others lock from the inside. Doesn’t seem -”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Hell, he’d not even fucking thought about it really until just then, that the kid hardly seems like he leaves the place, so it made more sense to emphasize locks he can use when he’s here rather than ones when he’s away. He’s probably got his computer set to fucking self-destruct or something if someone touches it that isn’t him.

Nigel stands, pleased at least to see that the machine is charging, and he turns back to Adam.

“Okay,” Adam says, shrugging. More locks are a good idea. More locks that he can control are a better idea. He thinks back to how Nigel had told him that he should put some on the windows as well. Maybe he would. Or maybe Nigel would and he would pay him more for it. Adam understands the point of such things but knows well enough that locks in any capacity are useless against a good thief.

He turns to the computer again, watching it with a furrowed brow. Hardly concerned that Nigel will touch it so much as something will happen while Adam is sleeping that he can’t control or fix.

“If it makes sounds,” Adam says. “Don’t touch it. It’s probably just rebooting a system or completing a task. If it asks for a log-in, leave it alone, I won’t give you that.”

“If it catches on fire?” Nigel prompts, and Adam turns to him with wide eyes.

“Why would it catch on fire?”

“Why would I touch it if it asked for a log-in?” Nigel counters. Adam’s brow knits and Nigel checks his watch. Five ‘til ten, and if the early incident is anything to go by, he’s no doubt that the boy will be sound asleep at exactly ten.

“If it catches on fire, call the fire department,” Adam tells him, and Nigel lifts his eyes. The furrow is still there, a single line stitched between his brows. “And if it asks for a log-in -”

“Leave it alone,” agrees Nigel. Four ‘til ten. “Under what circumstances, if any, should I wake you up?”

Adam’s lips part and he considers the question, still thrown by the comment about the fire that would not logically happen with the way he has his towers set up.

“Life or death.”

“For me or you?”

Three ‘til ten.

“Both,” Adam ventures. “If you’re about to die, I would like to know so that I could prepare for whoever killed you.”

“You wouldn’t help?”

“Help?”

“Save me from whoever might potentially make me kick the bucket.”

“I wouldn’t keep a bucket in the living room,” Adam murmurs, drawing a hand through his hair. “And I would. Help, I mean. If someone was here and you woke me to do it. But that’s why I have you, so that doesn’t happen. What good would it be to have a bodyguard if that happened with you around?”

Nigel grins at that, trying to hide it behind his hand a moment too late. It’s a fucking good question. He spans his hand towards Adam in yielding their half-assed duel of words, one-sided as it feels, and he watches as Adam watches the motion and blinks.

“Not very good,” Nigel says instead. “And about as fucking unlikely as your computer bursting into flames.”

Adam folds his arms with a sigh, some little release of tension in his shoulders.

Two minutes.

“Everything will be fine,” Nigel tells him, and he’s surprised by the ease in his tone. Adam’s disarming, in the way that only truly genuine people can be. He’s not putting on airs or being coy. He’s not being a smart-ass intentionally. And though a bitterness lingers in Nigel’s mouth - not from coke, this time - as to what’s got him wired enough to paint black circles beneath his eyes and bring him to hire a stranger into his home, there’s nothing inherently to mistrust.

“Go sleep,” he adds. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Adam just nods, once, and turns on his heel to go back to his bedroom, closing the door behind himself with a quiet click. Within, Adam regards his bed, he regards the neatly folded clothes and lined up shoes, he regards the papers he has piled up in equal piles of twelve sheets a set on his table. He thinks of the man beyond the door, someone with a reputation Adam would usually never go near. He hardly needs people like that in his life, and yet.

One of the only men who has never harmed a woman or a child, one of the only who refuses jobs that ask for that to be done. He is notorious, for violence and drug use and drinking, but he is still alive, he is still strong and he is clever if he has been in this business as long as he has.

Adam walks to his bed and checks that his gun is under the pillow.

Then he climbs in under the sheets and curls up in a ball beneath them, the weighted blanket keeping the corners pressed down, him just a lump in the middle of his bed. Insignificant, unimportant, finally allowed to sleep.

\---

The locks are installed, to no small amount of discomfort at the noise, but careful attention paid as Nigel shows him how they work and gives him the key.

More are put on the windows, at a height that they can still be opened to let in air, but not enough for someone to get through. He considers replacing the glass itself with something stronger, but Adam’s tension is palpable and he lets it go.

He remembers to bring coffee, two cups, one always fucking cold by the time he gets to it.

Finally he just brings with him a jar of instant that he can mix into the disposable cup.

Every night, Nigel arrives early. Sometimes just enough to be let in before Adam goes to bed, sometimes an hour wherein he sits quietly on the couch as Adam works. He isn’t sure why he does it. Their communication is perfunctory but not curt. It’s business, Nigel tells himself, and to the end that Adam can sleep and Nigel gets paid, it’s working.

Business doesn’t explain why he insists on showing up early anyway, knowing that every goddamn time it will be -

“You’re early.”

Nigel gives him a wry look as he steps inside. “I know.”

“Ninety minutes this time, Nigel. Ninety.”

“I want to see your gun.”

“I’m working.”

“So work,” Nigel answers, setting down his kit on the kitchen table.

Adam hums a sound of clear displeasure and shuffles from foot to foot.

“Why?”

“Because you always work until ten.”

“You’re being pedantic,” Adam points out, but his tone is exasperated, not angry. “Why do you want to see my gun?”

“Because I need to see if it’s fucking clean, Adam. A jammed-up gun will fuck you up much more than the person you’re aiming it at will.”

“It’s clean.”

“Is it?”

“It’s not dirty.”

“Bring me the fucking gun, Adam.”

Adam makes another of those sounds before turning on his heel and walking to his bedroom, shuffling through the sheets before he comes back with the thing, deliberately unloading it before handing it over.

Nigel decides not to comment on the action, because for as much as it’s a personal insult, it’s not unwise in itself. Better the kid be wary than go around trusting people like him, for fuck’s sake. He settles in at the table, unrolling a towel from his kit. The gun is taken with both hands, a Smith & Wesson M&P22. He could have done worse. Holds twelve rounds, strips simply, consistent safety - much as that fucking matters.

He could also have done better.

Nigel starts to disassemble it, speaking softly. “Better than nothing,” he says. “But you’ll have to plug them fucking full if they’re big or fucked-up on something.”

Adam frowns a little and swallows, just watching Nigel work with the gun like he has done it all his life. Perhaps he has. Adam won’t ask, and that part of his history was not pertinent in Adam’s search for Nigel initially.

“It was one of the few I could get without any traceable serial number,” Adam explains.

Nigel smiles at this, glancing up at him. “Good.”

It’s an easy clean, and despite some oil build-up and a bit of fuzz, it’s not in bad shape. What’s more interesting to Nigel is that - with an hour left until he takes his shower - Adam’s not working. He’s watching, instead, the turning screws and swipes of cloth, each piece given particular attention as Nigel works.

“Shouldn’t keep it under your pillow - start thrashing at night and grab wrong and you’ll blow your fucking brains out,” Nigel remarks, squinting down the barrel. “Must have been a bitch to get in this city.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Adam agrees, crossing his arms over his chest and still looking, memorizing the detail work and intricacies of cleaning this gun. Next time he will clean it himself, he will make sure it’s safe to use. In truth, he has never used it. Never on someone. He had practiced aiming, had practiced holding it up fully loaded, to make sure his hands could grow used to the weight.

He hopes he never has to fire it.

“I don’t thrash when I sleep,” he adds after a while. “I don’t move in my sleep at all. And I don’t have anywhere else to keep it.”

“Next to you, on the nightstand,” Nigel says. “Near as I can fucking tell I’m the only other one who’s ever here, so no one’s going to see it, and you’re above street level so no one’s peeking in your fucking windows, are they?”

Adam shakes his head.

Nigel notices the lack of gunpowder, he knows the thing’s never been used, and he finds himself strangely grateful to know that. Spooked kid goes and buys a gun to protect himself, doesn’t mean that he’s ready to see someone bleed out on his fucking floor from it. Probably hasn’t even imagined it, and even if he has, there’s no way to imagine how it feels until you do it.

Nigel knows. Nigel knows all too fucking well.

“Could use a bigger caliber, but you didn’t hire me for fucking consultation,” he says. “Might as well just have my own here.” A pause. “One of them, anyway.”

Adam blinks at him, turns his eyes to the gun, then the kit used to clean it, the man’s hands deft and capable as he had. He shakes his head.

“I don’t like guns,” he says. “I don’t know if I want more in the house.”

“They will come and go with me, I won’t keep them here.”

“But then you might lose them on the way,” Adam says, levelling a dry look on Nigel when the other scoffs. “Someone could take them. You live in the Bronx. Though the place is rife with guns there, people always seek to threaten and find another. And if you get caught with it by police -”

“I fucking won’t,” Nigel tells him, and Adam just closes his mouth. What more can he say? Perhaps Nigel has always carried his weapons around and no one’s ever bothered him. Maybe that’s just how he is.

“No big guns,” Adam tells him, turning to go back to his desk, finally, after the unusual breaking of schedule to watch over Nigel’s shoulder.

“Shit, I was going to bring my shotgun on the subway,” Nigel mutters.

“Please don’t.”

Nigel grins unto himself as he begins to piece the gun back together. He murmurs that it was a dumb joke and doesn’t know if Adam hears him or not - if he does, over the click of keys, he doesn’t say anything. Strange fucking kid. But Nigel doesn’t interrupt again, comfortable in the quiet of the moment, he at work on something he finds peace in, Adam working in his own. He tucks his things away into the kit again and checks the time, smiling just in his eyes as Adam’s chair rolls out and the clock turns 9:30.

He doesn’t venture near Adam’s room, instead turning the gun back to him grip first.

“Don’t forget to reload it.”

Adam takes it, careful not to touch Nigel’s hand as he does so, and lets the weight of the gun rest in his hand a moment.

“Thank you.”

He has seen the gun cleaned, now, knows where to store it that won’t possibly hurt him should he accidentally find himself squirming in sleep. He regards the gun and wonders how similar it and Nigel really are, deadly in the hands that know how to aim them, loyal to those that care for them.

He turns to go into his room without a word, closes the door, and a moment later Nigel hears the shower come on.

As always.

As per usual every night for the last three weeks that he’s been here.

Nigel doesn’t sit yet. He’ll be sitting all fucking night. Quiet neighborhood like this, even random break-ins are fucking rare. They actually have cops that circulate, unlike a lot of others. But it isn’t that Nigel’s itching for action -

Okay, maybe he is a little.

But mostly it’s just fucking dull. Adam’s company, what little there is to be found, is a welcome fucking respite when he arrives, and again when Adam wakes in the morning and emerges fully dressed to wait by the door for Nigel to leave so he can lock up after him. Nigel’s already begun to illicitly read Adam’s books from his neatly organized shelves, lots of shit about space but a few history ones that aren’t as full of fucking numbers.

He wonders what would happen if he woke Adam up for company.

 _Life or death_.

He just cleaned his fucking gun for him. Probably not smart.

Nigel glances towards him from where he stands beside the books, as Adam lets the steam out from his bedroom.

Two minutes ‘til ten.

He parts his lips with his tongue.

“Another early night?” Nigel ventures.

Adam just blinks at him. Different sleep pants on this week, dark blue but just as long. Nigel has wondered if they were once someone else’s and Adam had just never thought to get some in his size. He’s never asked. He never will. He watches Adam look at the clock and shrug, hesitating before moving out of the bedroom instead of back into it.

“My mind won’t stop working,” he explains. “I need it to calm down.”

Nigel blinks, taken aback at the openness that he’s certainly not been fucking privy to in the preceding weeks, but not at all unhappy about it. He knows the feeling - from benders, mostly, slamming all manner of controlled substances into himself in the least controlled way possible - but he’s spent days at a time awake, pacing, wandering the city hoping for a fight to spend his energy on.

So he _sort of_ knows the feeling.

“Television,” he suggests. He’s never seen it turned on but it’s there, screen covered in a thin film of static-cling dust. “Hard to keep your brain fucking working at all with that on.” He touches his tongue to his lips again. “Book, maybe. Those put me to sleep.”

“But I think about those too.”

Nigel ruminates, eyes on the ceiling rather than the kid standing in front of him, one bare foot over the other. “Got it,” he says, and paces to the kitchen. “Won’t do shit for your mind running but it’ll drag the rest of you down, then your brain with it.”

Adam makes a small disbelieving sound but doesn’t argue. He watches Nigel make his way to the kitchen, as familiar with the house as Adam is, now, and surprisingly careful, considering the man himself. Adam still frowns at the smell of smoke near the balcony but it’s not the worst thing that could happen.

He could smoke not on the balcony.

Adam doesn’t follow Nigel into the kitchen, but he does make his way to the couch to sit on it. It’s rare that he can’t make himself sleep at ten like he should, but on days it happens Adam finds himself restless in the worst possible way. Days like that lead to several where he can’t sleep at all, and that is never a good thing.

“What do you do?” Adam asks him. “When I sleep?”

“Remind myself how much I’m getting paid for this,” he answers from the kitchen with a brash laugh. “Count the fucking hours. I have a routine -”

Adam makes a curious sound, listening as Nigel closes a cupboard and switches on the stove.

“Two coffees, pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes give me time to look over the block. Coffee keeps me out of the sight of windows until I finish it. Check the locks starting in the kitchen, around the living room. Make sure you’re still snoring when I go by -”

“I don’t snore.”

“You don’t not snore,” Nigel counters, and Adam’s mouth opens, silent, without an answer before he closes it again with a frown. He listens to Nigel working in the kitchen, wonders how anyone can drink two coffees, how anyone can drink even one coffee. Adam doesn’t like coffee. He doesn’t think he ever will.

“Then what?” Adam asks after a while, fiddling with the string holding his sleep pants up.

“Check the other bedroom. Take a piss if I need it on my way back past the bathroom. Check the hallway through the peephole.”

Nigel emerges, triumphant, holding out a mug for Adam. And then he holds it a little longer as Adam peers into it, and watches the frothy milk within swirl slowly. Finally Nigel sighs.

“Fucking take it, Adam, Christ,” he says. “And then I read your books until it’s time to do it again.”

Adam takes the mug but doesn’t drink what’s in it, instead he just watches Nigel. He finds that for some reason he is not angry that Nigel touches his books, that he reads them. Books are meant to be shared and enjoyed, books are meant to be discussed and kept alive through conversation. And he never finds a single one out of place or damaged.

“Which ones?” he asks.

“The good parts of the history ones.”

Adam smiles. No, he laughs. It’s just a breath, and it only lasts for an instant before he furrows his brow, but the light that catches in his eyes lingers as they remain narrowed. Nigel watches as he brings the mug to his lips to sip, and pale pink blossoms beneath his eyes where there was only dismal sleepless violet before.

“The good parts?”

“Old stuff,” Nigel agrees. “Don’t need to know about the fucking big wars when they were in my fucking back yard. I like the knights, you know. And the Vikings. Swords.”

Nigel draws a breath but doesn’t say anything else about it. What the fuck could he say? He’s not smart. He’s certainly not as smart as the kid watching him now, blue eyes wide through grey curls of steam. Before he can berate himself for even mentioning the books - for even fucking reading them at all - he nods towards the shelves.

“Too many fucking space books,” he decides.

Christ, he could use a fucking cigarette right now.

“Unless you like books about space,” he adds.

“I like books about space,” Adam confirms, taking another sip of whatever it is that Nigel gave him. It’s nice, hot, and the action of cradling a mug and sipping slowly from it puts Adam at ease. He does this with tea, sometimes, when it’s too cold in winter. He does this with soup, sometimes, when he’s sick and doesn’t want to go to the doctor.

“These aren’t all the books,” he adds, licking his lips and turning his head towards the bedroom. “I have more books in there.”

“More space books?”

“Some space books,” Adam confirms, turning back, eyes narrowed in just that way again that suggest a smile. He’s not a bad looking kid when he pulls that damn stick out of his ass. “Other books, too. Why do you like the knight books?” Adam asks him, and Nigel is surprised to see that he is entirely genuine in his inquiry - he wants to know.

“Fucking pageantry, I suppose,” Nigel answers, once the surprise at Adam’s interest passes. “It’s a different kind of challenge, going to battle face-to-fucking-face rather than slinging bullets at each other from a distance. And -”

He stops himself, but Adam just watches him, as mindless of the way his shirt slips off his shoulder again as Nigel is acutely aware of it.

“They have their own code of honor, right?” Nigel ventures. He doesn’t doubt that he sounds unintelligent, poorly read as he fucking is. He doesn’t doubt that Adam could find far better words than the clumsy things Nigel struggles through. They taste slightly burnt, like toast done up a few notches too high on the toaster, rather than the tart, crispness in the way Adam speaks. “Granted most of it was for fucking lords, prodding at serfs with their swords to make them pay their taxes. Butchering other religions. But they had their honor they adhered to, you know? And they put in their service to guard. To protect. Fucking fearless to fight for someone’s interests other than your own.”

Adam listens.

He has read those books, and he remembers studying them at school, or what his school had assumed studying history was, with cartoon images of historical figures acting nothing like how they would have in their lifetime at all. Adam had started his own studying, fascinated by the knights templar, fascinated by the things they chose to do and the things they believed in. He loved the idea of such a collective, a coming together as men did in ancient times in Greece and Rome and Mesopotamia.

“The samurai upheld a similar code of honor,” Adam tells him after a moment. “They believed it was more honorable to take their own life than to live in dishonor. And they were recent. The Five Articles Oath in 1868 started the dismantling of them but people upheld the code for years and years after.”

Nigel doesn’t try to hide his smile this time. “Because they knew it was right, whether or not some higher authority said so.”

“They believed it was right,” Adam agrees and clarifies, all at once.

“Same thing, isn’t it?” Nigel asks. “The things you know defining what you believe. What you believe affecting how you look at everything else in the world. Fucking perception.”

Adam watches him, ducks a smile into his mug and works his fingers over it, again and again in a gentle tapping motion, an invisible pattern dotted over and over the plain cream surface.

“What do you believe?” Adam asks him suddenly, eyes up and actually looking at Nigel, now, almost through him, with the intensity of the gaze. “Do you believe that bad things can be done for a good reason? Or does that taint the good intentions when you do something wrong?”

Nigel feels his eyes draw up at the words, lips thinning together in thought. There’s no apology for asking a personal question, there’s no change in Adam’s expression as Nigel’s shifts. Wide-open and interested. Interesting. Nothing at all like the spoiled kid Nigel thought he’d be, overrun with the power of his parents’ money and his own existence.

He draws a breath, as if emerging from the depths whose bottom he’s yet to see.

“I don’t know that I could sleep any better than you if I thought the second way,” he considers. Just as open. Just as honest. “Some greater fucking good and evil - no.” Nigel shakes his head a little, and disperses the thought. “The first one then.”

“Who decides whether the reason is good or not?”

Nigel ducks his head, watching his hands in front of himself, fingers folded. Swollen knuckles from too many breaks, bones made stiff from an endless cycle of abuse and repair. Callouses roughened thick on his palms. With a breath, he manages a laugh.

“You,” Nigel answers, with a pensive smile beneath his eyes. “I am in your service.”

Adam sighs quietly, presses his bottom lip between his teeth and lets it go without taking his eyes off of Nigel. He wonders what the man would think of him, he wonders what one bad history is to another. He wonders, and he says nothing, and he pushes himself from the couch to take the unfinished mug to the kitchen.

When he comes back he smiles - genuinely, sleepily smiles - and shrugs as he pushes his shirt up over his shoulder again.

“I think sometimes bad choices lead to good consequences. And good choices lead to bad ones.” He nods, just once, does not elaborate more, despite there being that heaviness, that warmth suggesting he has more to say, just on the tip of his tongue. “I feel safer, with you here.”

Threads of tension snared tight unravel a little at the praise, and Nigel inclines his head, a bare gesture but enough that Adam notices.

“There are not many who can buy peace of mind,” Nigel says. “Money well fucking spent.”

With arms folded loosely around himself, Adam turns to go, and Nigel does as well. He stops, though, hand on the doorframe, and tells him.

“Warm milk. Little bit of honey and cinnamon.”

“I have cinnamon?”

“Yeah,” Nigel laughs, before he continues on to wash out the mug and return it to its shelf, listening as the door to Adam’s room slips closed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I wondered where the fuck that went,” he remarks, removing the bottle to stuff it into the plastic bag. “Didn’t mean to leave it. Thought I forgot it. I was fucking livid when I got -”_
> 
> _Nigel tilts the bottle back out again, thumb pressed against the screw-on cap._
> 
> _“- back,” he finishes, squinting. “You been drinking my fucking whiskey, Adam?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

_Where are you?_

Nigel nearly chokes on his fucking pizza. He drags his phone across the counter and mutters for it to shut up, buzzing loudly in his hand. It’s nicer than any of his other burners have ever been - maybe too nice. Glossy fucking screen and shit. Games that he’s tried to play for roughly a minute at a time before cursing and quitting.

And now a message from his employer.

 _eating_ he sends back, before folding the slice again to take another bite.

_When will you be here?_

Nigel snorts. There’s still two hours before Adam goes to take his shower, but Nigel’s already in the Village for lack of anywhere else to be. He imagines for a moment that Adam’s got a girl over and doesn’t want to be interrupted, and with a crease in his brow, he wipes the pizza grease onto his pants and slowly taps out a response.

_10_

He barely gets the pizza to his mouth when the reply comes humming through his phone.

_Come now._

Nigel just huffs, content to finish his pizza at the same pace he had been eating it. If it was urgent, Adam wouldn’t have asked him when he would be here, he would have sent out a fucking S.O.S. and not beaten about the bush. Another bite, another determined attempt at relaxing, and another message.

_Now, please._

Nigel curses, enough to draw a look or two, enough to have him raise his hands in a show of peace and silent apology both.

He still finishes his goddamn pizza slice before he gets up, but the text tastes cloying as candy and he can’t shake it until he gets up and goes.

Upon approach, nothing looks amiss. The door is intact, the lock not picked, there is no sound of struggle within. Though Nigel supposes that had shit really hit the fan, seeing a puddle of blood against the floorboards would have been just too damn cliche. He knocks. He waits. And one by one the locks slide open and Adam stands before him, entirely whole and safe and clean, eyes wide and cheeks just a little flushed.

Nigel raises an eyebrow. Adam swallows.

“I think I’ll change your hours,” he says. “From seven until seven.”

“You don’t take a shower until nine-thirty.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t go to fucking bed until ten.”

“Yes.”

Nigel sets his jaw. It’s like a trick fucking question without even being asked a question; a fucking joke from someone who never makes them. If Nigel felt like being honest with himself, he’s got nowhere else to be in particular, but twelve hours a day, every day - that’s cutting into what scant time for relaxation he has when he’s not sleeping.

What kind of sorry old fuck goes and sees girls at five o’-fucking-clock in the afternoon?

“So you’ve just decided that,” Nigel asks, brow lifting. He steps inside when Adam moves back, and inwardly curses himself for doing so. “Do you plan on asking me how I fucking feel about it? Maybe I’ve got shit to do before then.”

Adam blinks at him as though the thought had never even crossed his mind.

“Do you have things to do before then?” he asks, and Nigel’s mouth just opens, caught out in that all his plans are theoretical. Maybe he wants to go to a strip club. Maybe he wants to find some coke. Maybe he wants to fucking sleep in for a change and have someone share his bed when he does it.

Adam just nods. “So seven ‘til seven then. I will calculate how much more to pay for the overage.”

“What if I say no?”

Adam blinks at him again, tilting his head. “Are you saying no?”

“I fucking could be!”

 

“Well, are you?”

Nigel considers a moment. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, I’m saying no.”

“Why?”

He blames his trajectory into the apartment on automatic pilot, shoes clicking against the floor as he enters and continues to the kitchen. “You’ve not given me any fucking reason for it,” he says. “And you bitch at me every time I show up early.”

He brings out a fresh jar of bullshit instant coffee from the plastic grocery bag, to nestle on the corner of the counter where Adam set the last one. Two packs of cigarettes, distributed to front pocket of shirt and back pocket of pants, and he sets a fresh carton of milk in the fridge. It’s then that he sees the bottle of whiskey inside, his brand, though fuck if he’s ever met one he’d turn down.

“I wondered where the fuck that went,” he remarks, removing the bottle to stuff it into the plastic bag. “Didn’t mean to leave it. Thought I forgot it. I was fucking livid when I got -”

Nigel tilts the bottle back out again, thumb pressed against the screw-on cap.

“- back,” he finishes, squinting. “You been drinking my fucking whiskey, Adam?”

Adam’s brows go up and he watches Nigel with an expression so innocent one would think butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Then Adam gently parts his lips with the tip of his tongue and sighs.

“Just once,” he says. It had been a bad morning, a really bad morning, some vital information in a place it needed to never be. Adam had cleaned it up and made sure no trace remained but one never knew on the internet. He, of all people, knows that well enough. “Just when something went wrong.”

At least that makes sense. Fuck knows that Nigel’s not one to wag a fucking finger someone self-medicating, but it makes sense beyond that, too. Why Adam texted him. Why he wants him there for longer hours.

Nigel lifts the bottle to offer it to Adam again, and asks, “Someone came to the apartment?”

Adam shakes his head, whether at the offer or the question, and shrugs, fingers tapping against his arm where he has them crossed. It’s a strangely meticulous gesture, almost self-soothing. For a moment he says very little.

“Some sensitive information emerged in a place it wasn’t meant to be and I didn’t put it there. I’m worried I got hacked. I’ve spent all day reworking my firewalls and -”

“Did you fix it?”

“I think so?” Adam replies, brows furrowed and eyes up again. “There’s no way to really check.” He eyes the bottle again and works his lower lip between his teeth.

“Fucking take it,” Nigel sighs.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no ice in it.”

Nigel licks his lips and holds them between his teeth. He turns back to counter and seeks through the cabinets until he finds two cups, plastic. There’s rocketships on them, planets with rings and shit. Stars. He adds in two cubes of ice from the freezer and pours the whiskey over them halfway up the glass.

Then, in a moment of fucking whimsy, Nigel takes the plastic lemon off the door of the near-empty fridge and the sugar from its orderly line of jars on the counter. He adds. He stirs. He offers it, and takes up his own, on the rocks.

“Whiskey sour,” he tells him. “Is that why you want me here early every fucking night? There’s fuck-all I can do if it’s happening in your fucking computer,” Nigel snorts, taking a sip.

Adam holds his cup and considers it for a moment before taking a sip too, humming and frowning at the taste but drinking more anyway. He shakes his head.

“I feel safer with you here,” he reminds him, words spoken when he couldn’t sleep and when he had dropped the facade of a man uncaring. Now, Adam looks young again. His shoulders are tense, his entirely body pulled taut like a marionette on strings before he sighs out heavily and drinks the whole thing down in one go, making a plaintive little noise after at the burn.

“That’s disgusting.”

Nigel snorts. “Do you want more?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking personal bartender,” Nigel mutters, taking back the glass and peeling a sip off his own to accompany. Another whiskey sour, best he can do with old lemon juice and brown sugar, but he makes it a little sweeter this time, to lessen the burn. “I don’t suppose you’ll let me smoke while I fucking do this?”

“You can,” Adam says, “if you want to make it on the balcony.”

“If you weren’t my fucking employer -”

Adam makes a curious sound, taking a step closer when Nigel just hands the drink back to him. “Then you could smoke wherever you want,” Adam reasons, “because you wouldn’t be here.”

Leaning back against the counter, Nigel snorts into his own cup. Little pieces of silver confetti shine embedded in the plastic as he tilts it upward, seeming to envelop Adam in bits of star stuff as he lowers it again. He’s been pulling at the collar of his shirt, tilted off to one side beneath the russet sweater he wears. Grey slacks but no socks on beneath, which only ever happens before he goes to bed.

“Do I have to stay silent the whole fucking time?” Nigel asks. “If I agree to come in even fucking earlier.”

Adam shakes his head. “You don’t have to stay silent. You just seem to.”

“Because you don’t fucking reply when I try to talk to you.”

“Because I’m working,” Adam points out, taking a sip of the new drink and licking his lips of the pleasant sweetness. He watches Nigel’s brow go up.

“Shouldn’t you fucking be now, then?”

“I have the whole server scanning at the moment, I can’t work on it when it does that.”

“So you called me in fucking early because you’re bored?”

Adam opens his mouth to deny it and finds he can’t. He is unused to not doing things until he goes to bed, he is unused to being inactive or quiet or any of those things. He is used to working. He has done it for as long as he can remember.

“I’m not bored, I just don’t like being unproductive.”

“So you’re drinking my whiskey.”

“No.”

Nigel’s lips part, eyes narrowing as he watches Adam. He watches Adam take a fucking sip of the fucking whiskey, and stare at him fucking guileless. “Adam,” Nigel finally manages, “you _just_ fucking -”

“I didn’t do that because I’m being unproductive,” Adam tells him. “I did that because something went wrong.”

“And you’re doing it now because -”

“You made it for me,” Adam says.

The breath Nigel releases is both lungs’ full, all at fucking once. Every conversation, every fucking time, it’s like pulling teeth, and he almost wishes that Adam were working so that Nigel wouldn’t have to try so fucking hard at it. Adam takes another sip as Nigel straightens shoulders that had begun to slump in defeat, and takes his spaceship cup of whiskey to the balcony, letting in a wave of summer heat. Like opening a fucking oven, but a relief from the ceaseless fucking air conditioning in the apartment.

“Surely there’s other fucking things you do besides this,” Nigel calls into him, as Adam stands inside the door. Nigel ducks his head, hand cupped around the end of his cigarette. He needs only curse once to scare his lighter into functioning, dragging hard and speaking in smoke. “Movies. Food. I’ve never seen you fucking eat. Friends. Fucking - girls.”

“I eat,” Adam counters. “At eight in the morning and again at just after four.”

“You need three meals a day, no wonder you’re so fucking tiny.”

“I’m not tiny,” Adam replies, sipping his drink almost petulantly, brows furrowed. His cheeks are already warm from this, and no fucking wonder, if the last time he ate was four hours ago. Nigel wonders if Adam realizes he’s going to be fighting one hell of a hangover if he doesn’t take measures now. He wonders if he should tell him or just watch.

“And I don’t like people,” Adam reminds him. “Girls or boys. Movies have too many people in the cinema, too much noise, some people chewing loudly, others coughing or scratching or - it’s terrible. I don’t like going.”

“Will you find a fucking counter to everything I suggest?” Nigel asks him, exhaling out towards the street, and at that Adam almost preens.

“Yes,” he says.

“Is it fucking fun for you?”

Adam considers the question. Prying apart someone else’s words is no different than prying apart an encrypted password or a secure network. Seeking out weaknesses and rending them, finding new pathways therein. He sucks the taste of sugar from his bottom lip and nods, smile twitching wider, “Yes.”

With a snort and a drag from his cigarette, Nigel masks his own smile, watching ruddy red prickle up across Adam’s cheeks. Their eyes meet for a blink, no longer, but it’s more eye contact than they’ve ever shared before. Nigel could swear Adam’s cheeks darken more for it.

“So you don’t like people. You don’t fuck around. You eat here. You’re like a little prince, up here alone in your fucking ivory tower.”

“There’s no -”

“It’s a fucking turn of phrase, I know there’s no fucking ivory in it.”

“No tower, either.”

“You need to fucking eat,” Nigel tells him, stubbing out his cigarette against the bottom of his shoe before flicking the filter to the street below. “Little prince or fucking not, I’m not listening to you puke up whiskey sours all night.”

“I’m not going to -”

“You don’t have to go out. Fucking order in. I can even meet the guy at the door if he’ll fucking annoy you.”

Adam’s smile is bright and ridiculous before he tempers it and takes another sip. He gets his groceries delivered, he does his laundry in the dead of night when no one is there. For all intents and purposes he is a rather well-functioning shut-in. Besides Nigel, he barely sees another human being outside of the people who pass the window.

“I don’t like getting food delivered.”

“Have you ever fucking tried it?”

“Yes.”

“What have you tried?”

“I got a pizza delivered once,” Adam says, straightening his shoulders as though it’s a matter of exceptional pride, smile unfurling in the sensation of verdant green.

“And you didn’t like fucking pizza?”

“There was too much of it. I couldn’t eat it all and then it got,” Adam pauses, “hard.”

Nigel doesn’t have a rebuttal for that - fuck knows he’s forgotten a whole pie before when he went to sleep instead of eating it, cursing a blue streak the next morning when it went stale. He’d eaten it anyway, but that’s him. That’s certainly _not_ Adam.

“Chinese then,” Nigel says. Adam wrinkles his nose but Nigel lifts a hand. “The grease will - nevermind. It’s -”

He squints in thought. Adam’s not going to care that it’s cheap, or that it goes well with drinking. It’s new and it’s different, and Adam doesn’t like that. Piece by piece, through the scant conversations they’ve shared over the last - Christ - almost two months, Nigel’s started to learn the peculiar rhythms of his boy-employer. A little prince in-fucking-deed, who likes everything done a certain way.

“It’s like your macaroni and cheese, right? You eat a fucking lot of that. What is it? Pasta. Noodles. This is noodles too, just - without the cheese.”

“That doesn’t sound appealing,” Adam mumbles. Nigel just curses, taking another drink from his cup as well. 

“What do you eat the mac and cheese for? The mac or the cheese?”

“Both,” Adam says. “Hence I make mac and cheese, and not macaroni on its own or cheese on its own. I have both. I just don’t make them separately.”

“Are you going to survive on mac and cheese for-fucking-ever?”

“No,” Adam replies, though the word is drawn out. He sets his teeth against the rim of the cup and slowly tilts it to dribble into his mouth until the ice in the cup presses up against his top lip and he holds it properly again.

“Are you only saying that because you have cereal every fucking morning?”

Adam parts his lips and they remain that way, mind working quickly for an answer that would prove him wrong. Nigel snorts, with a flash of sharp-toothed grin, triumphant.

“Fucking thought so,” he says. “Fucking vegetables, Adam. You need to eat fucking - brain fuel. Whatever. I want fucking Chinese, and you might like it.”

“I won’t.”

“But you’ll try it,” Nigel tells him, and it’s not a question. He takes out his phone, holding it close to his face as he taps slow against it, searching. He hears Adam take a breath and mutters, “I’ve fucking got it.”

He orders three different dishes. Boxes, really, but what-the-fuck-ever. Rice. Yes, extra rice. Yes, he knows it’s fucking extra. A pause.

“You get a soda with it,” he tells Adam.

“Orange.”

“Orange,” Nigel says to the phone. He gives them not the address but the corner and tells them he’ll be waiting, before hanging up. “There. Fucking done, and you’ll be glad for it tomorrow if you’re having any more of those.”

In answer, Adam holds his cup out and smiles when Nigel takes it with a sighed curse and returns to the kitchen.

“It’s distracting,” Adam says. “The drinking. It’s warm and it makes my mind fuzzy and the room feels like it’s inflated, but I know it isn’t. This is why I never drink.”

“I’d never fucking believe it,” Nigel snorts, and Adam shakes his head deliberately slowly, eyes closed so he doesn’t get dizzy.

“Usually, I need to concentrate.”

“Uh-huh, and this evening?”

“I need to concentrate on not concentrating on anything, because I can’t, since my servers are being scanned and the firewall is adjusting to the new settings.” Adam sucks his lip into his mouth and sighs, moving to sit at the table, back to Nigel for a moment. “Why are you doing it? You’re at work. Literally. You shouldn’t drink on the job.”

The tone is far from accusing, more playful, and Adam does turn to look over his shoulder when Nigel makes a sound.

“One half a space-glass, spread out in the time I have until my shift actually fucking starts, with a belly full of Chinese food,” Nigel tells him.

He makes his drink with a bit of water and another ice cube, just enough whiskey to taste. Charming as he finds the thought of getting the little prince hammered, the sounds of weepy snuffles and vomiting are not the soundtrack Nigel wants for his night. He offers the cup back to Adam, and adds, “It’d take a fucking lot more than that to have any effect that I’d notice, darling, let alone that you would.”

Adam takes it and sits back, watching him. He remembers finding Nigel's name and doing his research. Background, known aliases... Adam had not finished. He knew enough that Nigel seemed the appropriate candidate when he wrote to him. Adam sits, now, and considers how glad he is that he did.

In truth, he had found Nigel frightfully brash and imposing. In truth, for the first two nights Adam had not slept, with Nigel there. Wary. Curious. Hand on his gun though he knew he would never be able to use it.

Now Adam squirms in his seat and draws a leg up to curl beneath himself on the chair.

"Why do you drink so much?" he asks.

Nigel’s brow creases at the question, prickling. The same sensation as when Adam pointed out that swearing makes him sound uneducated. That he’s addicted to cigarettes. He’s fucking blunt, digging into sensitive places with slender, curious fingers, but not once has he seemed to say those things in order to hurt. God knows Nigel’s worked for enough pricks that get off on reminding Nigel of his place and demeaning him to keep him there.

It’s curiosity, an attempt to understand. Nothing more than that.

“Because it’s fun,” Nigel shrugs, turning his cup in a slow circle as the ice melts within. “Because it feels good, until it doesn’t.”

“And then?”

“Because I want to,” Nigel answers. “That fuzziness - that softening. You see it, yeah? All the hard fucking edges gone. Thoughts and memories that you might get fucking stuck on just… slipping through your fingers.”

Adam takes another sip, and Nigel frowns a little. “But it’s not good for that all the time. A bad fucking coping mechanism. Makes it easier and easier to have a little more, a little more, until next thing you know you’re waking up to women you’d flinch from sober, with an empty wallet and more in fucking hotel damages than you could ever hope to fucking pay.”

Adam frowns, expression almost sage with understanding as he takes another sip of his drink and regards Nigel more closely. Adam has followed the rise and fall of Nigel’s bank accounts through the last half decade, some on booze, a lot on women, different hotels every week, transport, drugs…

“Is that what I will be distracting you from now?” Adam asks him. “Women you don’t actually want to sleep with and hotel damages?” He sniffs, just once, and turns his eyes to his cup, mumbling into it so it sounds almost hollow. “You should thank me for the hours. I will save you a lot of money.”

Nigel breathes out hard. He laughs, a loud, humorless thing at the fucking gall of this kid who thinks he’s got any fucking right to say a fucking thing about Nigel’s life. Nigel can’t remember how many times he’s been shocked speechless in his life, but this is one of them. Adam offers him a smile, small, in response to his laugh, and it’s too fucking much.

Nigel finishes his watered-down fucking whiskey in a single drink, wipes his mouth with his hand, and turns to leave.

“Where are you going?” Adam asks, quickly, clutching his cup with both hands as he takes a slow, steadying step forward.

“To think about the few fucking pleasures in my life that I won’t be able to fucking enjoy because you’re a judgmental prick,” Nigel answers. “And because there’s a fucking delivery guy on the fucking corner waiting for your fucking food, little prince.”

The door bangs when he pulls it shut behind him.

Adam jerks with the sound, eyes wide and quickly flicking to the clock. There is still just over an hour until Nigel is meant to start his work, over an hour until he has to, _has to_ be back.

...Doesn’t he?

Adam shifts from foot to foot and holds his cup and doesn’t drink from it and replays the conversation in his head over and over. He had been honest. He had asked questions. He had even tried keeping eye contact. And for a while, they actually talked like people do, without stuttering silences and Adam needing to fill them with too much information. He’d made Nigel smile.

And then he’d made Nigel angry, by being honest, and to the point, and trying to hold a conversation like normal people do.

Adam makes a sound, he hates it, he hates that it always ends up this way, somehow, and it’s always his fault.

He looks to the clock again and shifts his weight again.

Nothing is where it should be. The door to the balcony is still open. Nigel’s cup is by the sink, not washed. His bag with his cigarettes is still on the counter, and the front door is unlocked, and Adam’s computer is busy, and he’s slow to focus on things that he looks at. He’s not where he should be. He’s not how he should be.

Everything is open. Unsafe. Chaotic. Even Adam’s breath can’t steady, too short or too long. The noise he makes again sounds distant from him, and his stomach twists. He didn’t mean to make Nigel angry, and he tries to think through anything he said that was wrong and he can’t. He never denied that Nigel likes those things, he just agreed that they weren’t good things to spend money on.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Nothing makes any sense when it’s all out of order.

He didn’t mean to. Whatever he said, he didn’t mean to, he wouldn’t have if he had known -

Adam looks up as the door opens again, choking on a breath tight in his throat.

“Fucking guy thought I was bullshitting him,” Nigel mutters, locking the door behind himself, a bag of delivery in his other hand.

“You came back,” Adam whispers, eyes wide, and still standing in that same damn spot he had been when Nigel had slammed the door on him. “You came back. I thought you’d gone, when you left, you were angry and I made you angry and I didn’t mean to, and I was trying to figure out what I said and I don’t know what I said, I never know what I say that has people confused or angry or laughing at me and I -”

Adam takes a breath, deep and trembling, and releases it just as slow. “And I didn’t want you to go home angry. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

Nigel sets the bag to the table and begins unpacking little boxes of greasy Chinese food. He had his long walk around the block. He had two cigarettes in the process. He argued with the delivery guy and tipped him extra anyway. The sudden defensive anger has simmered, but the fleeting pleasure Nigel was surprised to find in their conversation hasn’t yet returned.

“I don’t think you meant to,” he allows. “Fair fucking play for nosing into what you do with your life.”

“I don’t -” Adam takes a breath again. “I like computers because they are not like people. They don’t say what they don’t mean, they don’t hide unspoken things between words that mean something different. They are mathematical and they make sense.”

As though to send the message home, Adam’s words are interrupted by a very loud hiccup.

“Asperger's makes it hard for me to talk to people and read their social cues,” he adds, pressing his fingers against his lips when another hiccup threatens to interrupt him. “I get things wrong, and I say things that sound mean when I don’t want - want them to be.” Adam glares at his cup, silently blaming the alcohol.

In the same smooth movements that carry him through setting up bowls for them, laying out the spread of food, Nigel plucks Adam’s cup from his hands and rinses it. He refills it with water and takes an ice cube from the freezer, elbowing it closed as he hands Adam’s glass back to him.

“Drink,” he says. “All at once, don’t talk ‘til it’s gone. The water, not the ice cube. Then you’re going to sit and eat and tell me what the fuck that is.”

“Asperger’s?”

“Drink.”

Adam sighs, allows another loud hiccup before taking the cup and downing it. He frowns halfway through, unhappy, but continues as he’s told, until the ice bumps up against his lips and he sets the cup down with a harsh breath and takes another through his nose.

“Okay,” he says, unnecessarily, looking up at Nigel. “I don’t… I don’t know where to start and I don’t think you want to hear everything so. It’s easier if you ask and I tell you.”

Nigel motions to the place he set for Adam, and Adam holds his breath a moment more. It’s opposite the chair he normally sits in, as Nigel takes his, but he ducks his head and sits anyway. Rather than reach for the food, he drums his fingers against his arm, a steady movement that Nigel watches for a moment before forking out food for them both in turn.

“What is it?” Nigel asks, and Adam shakes his head.

“An autism spectrum disorder.”

Nigel’s eyes narrow in thought. “Like - what the fuck was it - ‘Rain Man’.”

“No,” Adam says. “That’s a movie.”

“That,” Nigel interjects, if only to fit words between the breaths Adam takes before he speaks again. “You’re fucking literal. About everything. Fucking jokes and -”

“It all sounds the same,” Adam says. “When you tell me you’re joking, then I can think through it again and understand it. If you don’t tell me, it just -” He frowns at the noodles in his bowl, the bits of beef and broccoli peppered with bits of red spices. “It’s like someone saying the sky is green. It isn’t. And if I don’t know that you’re not being serious -”

“You’re not just being an asshole,” says Nigel. “It just doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“Right. And expressions - body language -”

“Looks the same,” asks Nigel. “Just - silent words, but still words. Kind of.”

“It’s like trying to understand a language I don’t speak,” Adam says. “Linguists believe that one can be entirely fluent in a language, know its rules and grammar, but they cannot consider themselves anywhere near native speakers if they do not understand nuances and jokes, sarcasm and unspoken meanings. For me, everything is like that. My world doesn’t have unspoken things, they’re all spoken.”

Adam watches as Nigel takes up his fork to curl in the noodles, frowns at the smell of it, unfamiliar but not disgusting. He doesn’t take up his fork yet.

“Sometimes I want to be an asshole,” Adam admits. “And when I do and when I don’t people think I am anyway. I don’t talk to people well. It’s why I work on the computers and through them. They talk for me. Their language I can understand - what is that?”

“Lo mein,” Nigel tells him. “Noodles with - sauce, I don’t fucking know. There’s vegetables in it.”

“I see a carrot.”

Nigel points with his fork. “The brown bits are pepper steak. White things are fuckin’ bean - bean strings. I don’t remember. There’s fried rice in one of those boxes too. Broccoli.”

Adam nods, taking it all in, and picks up his fork but doesn’t yet move it towards the bowl.

“Wouldn’t it help if you looked at people when they talk to you?” Nigel asks, but he pauses, a fork curled with noodles perched by his mouth. “Now I sound like a fucking asshole and I don’t mean to be,” he says, before adding with a snort, “for once.”

Adam just smiles, gently shifting things around in his plate before curling a noodle - single, somehow - around the prongs of his fork.

“People think I’m weird if I stare at them when they talk,” Adam says. “They don’t seem to think it as weird when I don’t look at them. I don’t know, like you do, how much to look and how not to look and when to meet someone’s eyes and when to look away. That’s not a language I speak either.”

He places the fork between his lips and pulls it free clean, chewing slowly as he takes in the taste of his new dish, as he watches the movement of Nigel’s hands against his own cutlery, eating with gusto.

“It tastes nice,” he says.

This finally returns a slight smile to Nigel, deepening the wrinkles around his eyes. It occurs to him that maybe saying things out loud would be better, so long as he means them. No bullshit, no half-truths, no sarcasm.

“I’m glad,” he manages, breathing a little easier when Adam’s expression warms at the words.

They eat comfortably, though as Nigel demolishes what’s in his bowl, Adam works with slow particularity through his own, tasting each individual piece, pushing some aside, eating others more than once. Nigel watches, but he doesn’t say anything about it. If the world’s that hard to understand, and fuck knows it is for Nigel too a lot of the time, then it makes sense that everything should be in its proper place. Meals and showers and bed times, all of it. He takes up one of the little square napkins stuffed inside the bag, along with the obligatory fortune cookies, sliding one to Adam across the table.

“So what do you need from me?” Nigel asks. “Beyond the shit you’ve already told me. If I’m going to be sitting here twelve fucking hours a day, you know.”

Adam looks up then, just high enough to see Nigel’s mouth and not his eyes, and bites his own lip softly. In truth, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if things he wants are things he _wants_ or needs, if they are things that people should want or if he is being selfish. He has been on his own so long that Adam no longer knows much of anything, really, that is socially acceptable.

Can he ask for a friend?

Can he ask for a _babysitter_?

Adam just pokes the cookie with his fingers gently and returns his eyes to the bowl.

“Company?” he asks after a while.

Nigel makes a small sound. He feels it leave his throat, too soft to be heard across the little table at which they sit, and feels from where it came. Deep inside, an unfamiliar place somewhere behind his ribs, suddenly overcome with such searing warmth that he could no more not make that particular sound than he could not take the breath that follows.

He assumed. He assumed that a kid like Adam had plenty of company - friends, family, associates, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. He assumed and yet he’s never seen any evidence of it. He assumed and here’s this kid, seeking protection so desperately that he keeps a gun beside his bed, who’s asking to _pay_ Nigel to just be there. Not only to watch over his computer while he sleeps at night, but to watch over - well.

Him.

And the little match flame that snapped to life inside him alights, luminous.

“I don’t know if I’m good company,” Nigel admits, breathing out a laugh. “But I can try.”

Adam’s smile is immediate and genuine, and though he still doesn’t meet Nigel’s eyes when he looks at him, it’s clear Adam means for him to know he’s grateful. He wants to say that the fact that Nigel has been here two months and not walked out is enough, he wants to say that he hopes he would stay even if Adam stopped paying him, though he has no reason to. He wants to say that Nigel is interesting to him, brash and strange and entirely _other_ to Adam.

He opens his mouth and manages another loud squeaking hiccup, clapping a hand over his mouth immediately as though to push it back in. Eyes wide and finally on Nigel’s, he snorts and presses both hands against his face to laugh into them, tipsy and warm, filled with foreign food and sitting across someone at the dinner table that has been empty of anyone but Adam for nearly a year.

“Water,” Nigel tells him, grinning despite himself as another hiccup erupts behind Adam’s hand. He pushes out from the table and takes his own empty bowl to the sink, gathering up the empty take-out containers on the way. Reaching back for Adam’s cup, Nigel holds his hand aloft as he feels the flutter of fingers against it, brief.

“Will you make me another -”

Nigel catches Adam’s gaze for an instant, wide and blue as summer sky. Not the half-grey bullshit sky in the city, but the sky outside of it, unobstructed by buildings or smog or even clouds. He draws in a breath and swears he smells flowers, far-away, like roses, before finally snaring Adam’s cup.

“One more,” Nigel tells him. “Not letting you finish all my fucking whiskey. And then water. Lots of it. You’ll be glad in the morning, fucking trust me.”

“‘kay,” Adam replies, stifling another hiccup as he considers how much food is left over in his bowl still, when Nigel’s is empty. He picks at it a few more moments before just leaving it. He’s not used to eating in the evening, this is new, strangely novel. A glance to the clock reveals that there are twenty minutes left until he would - usually - go to take a shower and get to bed. Adam bites his lip and calms his inner turmoil at being ‘late’ for that.

He’s not late. 

He doesn’t move when Nigel sets the glass in front of him again, just narrows his eyes at the clock, and turns back only when Nigel sits opposite him. He reaches for his cup and allows another hiccup before taking a sip, smiling contented at the taste, and making no move to get up.

He’s on his own clock. And he can change that when he wants.

Nigel, true to his word, doesn’t make himself another whiskey. His shift starts soon enough, whether or not Adam is still awake, but in truth, the thought of company for a little while longer isn’t at all unwelcome. He nods towards Adam’s bowl, and asks him about cosmonauts. Not just space, big as it fucking is, but something more specific.

And Adam talks. Eagerly, enthusiastically, slurring a little but not so much that Nigel is concerned for him. A question here or there spirals off into another conversation, another, mostly one-sided but Nigel hardly minds that. Neither does he mind, to his own surprise, asking questions. Not once does Adam scoff at him, not once does Adam get that narrow-eyed smugness of someone who thinks they’re smarter.

Still listening, Nigel clears away the leftovers, saving those of which there’s enough to bother, disposing of the rest. Still listening, Nigel refills Adam’s glass with water, twice, and washes the dishes.

He listens as he checks the clock and finds the time nearing eleven. He listens as he starts his rounds and Adam settles into the couch. He listens until Adam’s voice settles to halting murmurs, and deepening breaths, and a snore.

Nigel won’t go in his room to get a blanket, wary of the suspicions that will cause. He considers getting one from the spare bedroom, but if Adam’s rigidity in food and time and placement of objects is as stubborn a thing as the little prince himself, he can’t imagine what a start it’ll be for him to wake up somewhere other than his own bed. Shit, Nigel doesn’t even have a bed to call his own and he’s still alarmed when he wakes up in a chair or wrapped in blankets on the floor.

He draws a deep breath, looking down at Adam curled to his side, hair spilling into his eyes and lips parted on sleepy little noises. And then Nigel sighs, and he bends, carefully, to lift Adam from the couch.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _When Adam opens the door, almost immediately, his eyes are narrow, expression far from pleased, but also, interestingly, far from angry. Adam takes a breath and holds it, lips pursing in displeasure, before he turns away and walks into the apartment, letting Nigel follow._
> 
> _“You’re late and you reek of sex,” Adam tells him. “Please take a shower.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Sometimes Nigel comes to find food already waiting for him. Not necessarily Chinese, but something to eat. And it’s on Adam’s dime, so he can hardly complain - not that there’s much he finds he has to complain about now, in general.

Sometimes Nigel comes to find nothing at all, and a sleepless, disheveled Adam at his computer making soft sounds of distress about some code or another. On those days, he lets Adam talk. And Adam talks. He talks for upwards of hours, sometimes, uncaring that Nigel doesn’t reply. He seems to relax after it, though, and it’s not exactly a fucking hard thing to do, just listen to Adam’s panicked words until they calm as he sorts through his work.

Sometimes Nigel comes to find Adam silent, no food, nothing at all, and until nine-thirty Nigel just sits on the couch and reads whatever is on the table, or whatever he’s brought with him.

Tonight, Adam is quiet, but there’s food, and an opened half-drunk soda on the table, and the windows open only where Adam can see them, so he can feel the breeze on his neck. He’s in a simple button-up today, sleeves meticulously rolled up and just the smallest hint that he is too hot and too lazy to do anything about it by the way his hair presses to his forehead.

It’s still light outside when Nigel starts his shift now, though the sun casts long shadows down the little street on which Adam lives. He sets down his things from the corner store. It’s always the same now, a pack of cigarettes and a magazine - sometimes a porno rag, sometimes something with words worth reading - and a fresh soda for Adam that goes directly into the fridge.

He doesn’t speak, with Adam as close to his screen as he is, but he takes down a glass and quietly adds a couple of ice cubes from the freezer. He checks that at night too, now, to ensure they’re there since Adam wouldn’t think about it. Pouring the remaining soda from the bottle on the table into the glass, Nigel swirls it to let it cool and quietly sets it beside Adam at his desk.

“Drink,” he says, before taking a cigarette from his shirt pocket and making for the balcony.

“I’m not thirsty.”

“Drink it.”

So Adam does, eyes glued to the screen as he types something quickly with one hand, the other damp with condensation as he sets the glass down again.

“It went through,” Adam says.

“What?”

“When I made you stay later three days ago,” Adam clarifies. “When I didn’t sleep and you refused to leave ‘til I did. It went through. The job.”

“Darling,” Nigel sighs, lifting a hand in vague apology as Adam shoots him a look. “The less I know about what you do, the better.”

“I haven’t even told you the details of it.”

“Don’t,” Nigel says. He manages a smile, holds it long enough for Adam to return it, and then cracks open the door to the balcony. “Not that I’m not fucking curious, but I’m here for a reason and knowledge is a fucking liability.”

Adam lifts his glass to take another sip, sucking the cold soda from his bottom lip. Nigel keeps his smoking hand out of the apartment, but lingers halfway in the doorway, leaning back against the sliding glass and regarding Adam with vague amusement.

“I’m glad it went through,” he allows, and takes a drag. Holding deep and sighing slow, Nigel exhales towards the street but keeps his eyes on Adam. “Is there money in it?”

Adam hums the affirmative, taps something else on the keyboard and slowly flexes his fingers, out and in, out and in.

“Four and a half.”

“Thousand?”

“Million,” Adam corrects, without batting an eye. “Four and a half million. It was a pretty important job. I’m glad that I -”

“Four fucking million?”

“Four and a half,” Adam reminds him.

Nigel chokes on his smoke, coughing abruptly and with no small degree of anger towards the hapless cigarette that caused it.

“Fucking Christ, Adam,” he manages, raw-throated and still half-coughing. “What do you - with just your fucking computer -”

Adam draws a breath and Nigel lifts his hand again.

“No. I don’t want to fucking know,” he lies, and Adam blithely sips his soda again. “But I wouldn’t - fuck, Adam. Don’t just go around saying shit like that. No wonder you’re fucking concerned about security. Where does it go?”

“The four and a half -”

“Yes,” breathes Nigel.

“Off-shore accounts.”

“Plural,” Nigel clarifies. “More than one. Who did you fuck up, Adam?”

As he asks the question, he glances towards the street. He hears Adam roll his chair out to come closer, but Nigel’s not survived this bullshit as long as he has without developing a keen sense of awareness in the process. He folds his arms against the balcony as Adam steps to the door behind him.

“I found information that was technically within the public’s reach on the internet and merely pointed that flaw out to the people who had put it there.”

“You hacked it.”

“Anyone could do it.”

“No, Adam, not everyone could fucking do it,” Nigel tells him, frowning at the kid behind him as Adam draws a hand against the back of his neck to wipe the sweat there. “So that’s what you do?”

“I find information anyone could find. And if anyone can find it, someone will, and if someone unsavory does, then those people who put it there will be in trouble for their own stupidity in not hiding it somewhere it can’t be found.”

“I bet they didn’t just shove it up for the world to see. There would be, fuck, protocols or some shit to protect it.”

“But I got through them,” Adam says, blinking slowly, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth again to taste the soda there before turning to get it, drinking down most of what is in the glass before holding it against his stomach and catching his breath. “They bought the information back. And some new defenses that I told them I could set up.”

“So you find the information and you sell it to the people it belongs to?” Nigel snorts. Adam shrugs.

“Sometimes.”

“And other times?”

“To the people who want it and want to pay more.”

Nigel squints a little, the muscles beneath his eyes drawing up as he takes this in and processes it. He takes a slower pull of his cigarette and looks back towards the street beneath, in particular a black car that’s been idling since he came out. Car service, maybe, waiting on someone who’s willing to pay their bullshit prices to go wherever.

“Like a sex tape,” he surmises, and Adam breathes a laugh. Nigel glances to him, finding a smile creasing the corners around his eyes before he can stop himself before turning away again. “You can sell it back to the person who made it, and they get to keep their fucked-up sex life private, or if they won’t pay, you let the media have it.”

“Corporations have a lot of enemies,” Adam points out, moving to rest his shoulder against the doorframe as Nigel continues to smoke, eyes seemingly in the middle distance. “Some have good lawyers, others have better secrets. I don’t care where the information goes. My job is to point out to any interested party that it exists and can be accessed.”

He finishes his soda and shrugs. “I suppose I could look up sex tapes, they’re easy enough to find. And sex always sells. And too many people make them, though I hardly know why.”

Nigel holds the cigarette between his lips for a drag down to the filter, and drops his free hand to his side. A curl of fingers is enough of a wave for Adam to notice and take a step back inside, watching curiously as Nigel flicks his cigarette away.

“Because people like to fuck,” he suggests.

“But why would you -”

“Because people like to see themselves fucking, I guess,” Nigel shrugs, turning his back to the car and setting his hands to the balcony railing. A slight stretch of his shoulders, a tilt of his head back and forth to crack his neck, and he nods again to Adam, eyes towards the apartment.

Adam holds his glass in both hands and takes another step back inside. Nigel eases a little then, the tension fading from his shoulders into a stretch that spreads his fingers wide.

“Everyone thinks they’re a fucking porn star,” he says. “Proof of fucking conquest, I don’t know. That’s what fucking mirrors are for and it’s less fucking permanent.”

He pushes forward off the balcony and steps back inside, sliding the door shut behind. He locks it and jerks the curtain closed behind.

“I don’t know why you would need to prove anything with sex,” Adam shrugs. “You either like it or you don’t, and your partner does or they don’t. You can’t really prove much else.” With that he turns to go to the computer again, dropping into the chair enough to make it softly squeak and swing one way then the other, when he catches himself with a hand to the table.

“Your magazines sometimes have pictures of very strange positions in them that can’t be comfortable. And no one looks that good having sex, it’s not possible. Sex is messy.”

Nigel jerks the curtain again, adjusting it to block off any insight through the balcony, and with a hand still in the soft fabric, he regards Adam at length.

Bewildered. Nigel is fucking bewildered.

“You can prove that you’re fucking good at it,” Nigel finally ventures. “Prove that you look fucking good doing it. Prove that the other person fucking enjoyed your cock in them.”

He shakes his head as if to clear away the words he just said to his fucking employer, pacing to the kitchen.

“It’s fucking messy. It’s usually fucking bad,” he agrees. “Grunting and sweating everywhere, but everyone wants to look like a fucking magazine or a fucking video. That’s why they fucking record it, and that’s why they’d pay someone for it not to get out again. It’s fucking embarrassing.”

Adam just watches him, curious as Nigel talks. Then he just nods, lips gently pursed together, before letting his eyes slide to his computer screen again with a sigh.

“People make very little sense to me,” he admits, burying himself in his work again.

At nine-thirty, Adam goes to take a shower.

At ten, he crawls into bed and curls into a ball to sleep. He sleeps like a cat, Nigel notes, every fucking time. He watches him ‘til his first coffee comes due, and then he stands and takes the time to make it, to go and check the windows and make sure the door is secure. By the time he’s back, Adam has rolled to his other side, upsetting the blankets and making himself appear more like a feline than before.

At seven, Adam chews a piece of dry toast as Nigel gathers his things and tosses his trash and prepares to go.

“Sometimes,” Adam ventures, mouth full and words muffled. “Sometimes I wish I made more sense to people.”

Nigel’s sleeping on his feet, drowsy but forcing an alertness by sheer fucking force of will. He shoves a shoe onto his foot and regards Adam at the table, brow lifted.

“I think you make sense,” he says. “You make too much fucking sense.”

Adam washes down the toast with a sip of orange juice, bright blue eyes on Nigel. His hair is tousled every which way. The kid is still in his pajamas, feet curled bare one atop the other beneath his chair. Nigel almost feels remiss in putting on his other shoe, knowing it brings with it a long ride home, but he does it anyway.

“You see shit as it is,” Nigel explains, or fucking tries to, anyway. “Not through fucking bullshit and games and interpretations or whatever fucking else. Makes sense to me once I figured it out.”

Adam watches him a moment more, then nods, shifting his feet so that the left is on the right, now, instead of the other way around. Nigel finishes putting on his shoes, and makes himself stand. Adam just watches. Knows that he is exhausted, knows that he will go home to his little flat in the Bronx and collapse into bed until he is pulled from rest to return to Adam. Again.

Nothing to do in between, nothing to do beyond work and get money and save it for nothing at all but the cab fare here and back.

Adam wonders if he could let him go for a week or two, to return to his hobbies and spending. Maybe once the storm passes from the last deal and he won’t have to change his alias again. He likes this one. Nigel gave it to him without knowing he had.

He waves when Nigel salutes, mumbles about seeing him later, and leaves the apartment. Adam waits until he hears Nigel’s footsteps fade to quiet and then stands to look out the window, watching for him on the street.

There, he sees someone walk into Nigel, hands held up and a smile nervous on their lips as they murmur something and Nigel just shrugs. Adam swallows and turns away to get dressed.

“Sorry, fuck, it’s that kind of morning, man, I didn’t mean to walk into you. Sorry.”

Nigel only hesitates for a moment, looking up from the cigarette perched between his lips to take in the pretty girl’s face, her eyes hidden behind wide sunglasses. A single apology is fair, unnecessary but not unusual. Two is peculiar. A whole string of words to a stranger on the street is enough to raise his brow.

Maybe she’s fucking Canadian. They apologize a lot.

“It’s fine,” he mutters, when she lingers long enough to await acknowledgment before carrying on. Nigel finishes lighting his cigarette and glances towards the street. The car he’d been watching the day before isn’t there anymore, and Nigel spares a glance to the girl’s backside as she continues down the street, phone pressed against her ear.

Nigel makes it back to the Bronx, and the shitty little apartment he’s found since he’s here indefinitely. He nearly misses his stop and stumbling into his studio, he sleeps in his clothes, hand against his burner in case Adam needs something. He rarely does, and when the sun sets, Nigel drags himself out of bed to shower, toss on his clothes, and go again.

Day in, day out - rather, night in, night out. Adam is twitchier than usual when Nigel arrives, but he doesn’t express why and Nigel doesn’t ask. He leaves his soda in the fridge and at nine-thirty when Adam goes to shower, Nigel goes to smoke.

Sunglasses in the morning are a defense against a hangover.

Sunglasses at night are fucking strange.

She sits on the stoop across the street, knees together and phone perched against her legs. Tapping quickly, lips pursed in thought, Nigel wonders where in the neighborhood she lives. What she does. Where she was headed - away from the brownstone where she sits now - so early in the morning.

Paranoid. He’s being fucking paranoid.

He finishes his cigarette and flicks it away with a flourish.

Nigel is _paid_ to be paranoid.

She’s still there when he casts his eyes out the balcony window at ten, when Adam bids him goodnight and retires. It’s weird. It’s fucking weird. Enough ideas run through his mind to have Nigel on edge, more than usual. Or maybe it’s his response to Adam’s own twitchiness, inexplicable but sitting on the air like a sound too low to hear but enough to feel in your bones.

She’s still there half an hour later, and as Nigel goes to the balcony for another cigarette he considers yelling at her to fuck off. At worst, he will be the shithead across the road who had too much to drink. At best…

He takes a drag, preparing, and watches as someone approaches her, hunched shoulders and hands in his pockets, imposing and threatening with little more than his walk. She jerks up before he can get close enough to touch. Nigel can’t hear the conversation but the implication is clear enough. The sunglasses make sense, at least.

It’s all he can do not to vault over the fucking railing and teach that bastard how to treat a woman properly. Abuse against children and women, the two things that rattle Nigel to the very core of his being. It makes him sick, he can’t fucking abide it. But here, he finds he can do little more than just watch. He’s got a job to do. He’s not standing on this fucking balcony smoking his fifth cigarette of the evening for shits and giggles.

And yet…

There’s something in the air that doesn’t feel right. It’s like the change in pressure before a thunderstorm, unsteadying him, or the prickle of someone approaching before you see them. Nigel could get down to the street in a matter of moments, batter some sense into the guy, send the weird girl on her way. He could, and as he turns the last dregs of his cigarette slowly in his fingers, he wagers that it could all be done in a matter of minutes.

And a great fucking many things could be done in less time than that.

His eyes narrow.

“Hey!” Nigel bellows, not towards the couple but to a pair of guys standing further down the block. “Go fuck him up for roughing up his girl like that!”

He points and the two men look towards the minor scuffle and quickly tread across the street to break it up. Nigel turns a wan smile to the man and woman, and without hesitating more, he returns back inside and locks the door behind.

\---

She’s there the next morning when Nigel leaves, sunglasses in place, long sleeves pulled tight down to her wrists to cover the marks left there the night before. She bounces up with the nervous energy of a skittish colt and makes her way over to him, padding quietly on flats that seem to be just a size too big.

“Hi,” she says softly. “I just… thank you, for last night.”

Nigel sighs past his cigarette, eyes lifting even when his head doesn’t. He follows up her leggings to the large shirt that suffices as a dress, curly hair pulled back into a knot with a few twists coiling against her throat. She’s cute. Tawny brown skin and a perky mouth. Nigel lowers his gaze again and takes a drag before pocketing his lighter.

“I’ve got no patience for pieces of shit,” Nigel answers. “You shouldn’t either.”

“I know,” she smiles. “It’s a long story.”

“Too fucking long if you’re putting up with that shit.”

“What’s your name?” she asks, and Nigel hesitates for a fraction of a second before pulling his cigarette from his lips. Exhaustion pulls at him, a steady, lulling thrum beneath the higher vibrations, unsettled and on edge for the last few days.

“Why?”

“It’d be nice to know who saved my ass last night.”

His jaw works and he tilts his head, neck cracking. “Nigel.”

She regards him a moment more, unnerving when he can’t see her eyes, but the sensation’s there. And it takes him a moment to realize that this is how it feels to be mentally undressed. Nigel wonders how fucking long it’s been since he’s had time to himself to relish the feeling, and realizes it’s been months. Months, since he’s had this.

“Rhia,” she says but she doesn’t offer her hand, her arms remain stoically crossed over her middle. She nods, just once, and licks her bottom lip into her mouth. “Thanks again, Nigel. New York’s not a place I would expect people to give a shit. It’s nice some still do.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, well-enough versed in social cues to know when to back off and turn tail, and so she does, pivoting on her toes and walking away down the street, a quiet slap of her flats against her feet as she goes. Nigel watches.

“Actually.” A pause, and Rhia turns back to him, lips parted on an inhale before she lets it out with a huff of breath. “Can I buy you a coffee? Or something?”

Nigel curls smoke between his lips and holds it until his heart treads faster.

 _Or something_.

He’s not above a gratitude-fuck. He’s not even above a pity-fuck. The only available time in his life unoccupied by Adam is spent sleeping, downing a few fingers of whiskey before he does, or finding food before going back to Adam again. It’s been months - fucking _months_ \- since he’s made a pretty girl gasp out his name, legs wrapped warm around his waist.

He ashes his cigarette, and thinks of the night before. It isn’t as if he couldn’t beat that guy into the fucking curb if he needed, and he figures that’s her angle. Seeking out a bigger predator to chase away the smaller one or some nature-channel shit like that.

“Was on my way to bed,” he says, eyes drawing up as he takes a drag. “Long night.”

“Working?”

“Mmm.”

“Where’s your bed?”

“Bronx.”

She lifts a brow, tip of her tongue set against her canine, and Nigel’s eyes drop to the slight motion before he can stop himself. Her smile widens and she lifts a shoulder in a shrug.

“You could sleep a bit closer than that,” she offers. “Right around the block.”

Sleep pulls at him, weighs his limbs and makes him unsteady. But this pulls at him more, suddenly and sharply, pulse heating beneath his skin and tightening in his belly. He takes another swift drag before flicking his cigarette to the gutter, and after a glance back towards Adam’s window, he looks to her and jerks his chin in a nod.

\---

Nigel wakes when his phone vibrates against an unfamiliar bedside table in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. And he only wakes because if he doesn’t move, the damn thing will keep ringing.

Behind him, he can feel the warm curves of Rhia as she sleeps in sweet repose, just as exhausted as Nigel is, by their fucking, by the alcohol they had decided could be drunk at any time, by the drugs… lord, whatever she had was fucking good. Nigel groans and Rhia turns, just enough, to slip one leg over Nigel’s hip, and he suddenly wants to tell the person on the other end of the phone to go fuck himself.

Instead, professional that he is, he sets a hot palm against Rhia’s ankle, caressing there. She slips an elegant, slim arm under his and draws manicured nails over his chest, and he reaches for the phone with the other hand.

“Fucking what?”

“It’s eight o’clock,” Adam’s voice comes through the phone, tinny, and even in that annoyed. “It’s actually eight-sixteen. You’re late.”

Nigel curses and Rhia's lips part against his shoulder, teeth grazing as if in promise to leave more marks on him than she already fucking has.

"Who is it?" she asks, rough-voiced. Nigel shivers at the purr and shakes his head.

"I got held up," Nigel says. Adam huffs, a curt little sigh.

"Doing what?"

"Making new friends."

A long silence processes, and Nigel imagines that were he to press his ear closer to the phone, he'd hear the hum of a hot computer rather than short, displeased little breaths.

"With who?"

"Doesn't fucking matter," Nigel grunts, ignoring both fussy sounds that he earns with words and actions, sitting up slowly. "I'm right near you. I'll be there by eight-fucking-thirty."

A pause.

"Eight-fucking-thirty-five if you need a soda."

Rhia lifts a brow, scarcely suppressing a smirk as she spreads her hand along Nigel's thigh instead.

With long sigh that morphs effortlessly into a groan, as clever fingers walk their way over his thigh to between his legs, grasping his cock to stroke, Nigel mumbles something about _I’ll just be there at fucking nine_ and tosses the burner aside.

At fucking nine, Nigel is at the door, hair a mess, face a mess, everything a mess, a bag of his usual necessities and fucking soda at his side as he slaps his fist against the door in a semblance of a knock and presses his forehead to it. His entire body still hums with sex and adrenaline and whatever he and Rhia had taken just before he’d reluctantly near-crawled out the door.

When Adam opens the door, almost immediately, his eyes are narrow, expression far from pleased, but also, interestingly, far from angry. Adam takes a breath and holds it, lips pursing in displeasure, before he turns away and walks into the apartment, letting Nigel follow.

“You’re late and you reek of sex,” Adam tells him. “Please take a shower.”

“Piss off,” Nigel answers, but with relatively little rancor behind it. He’s got nothing to be fucking rancorous about, his cock freshly spent on a tight body and a mouth to die for, something pleasant and warm humming through his veins, and a night ahead of little more than -

“Now.”

Both brows lift as Nigel turns a look to Adam, his arms folded across a striped sweater. He loosens them, sets a hand to the back of his neck, folds them again.

“You smell like -”

“How the fuck do you know what sex smells like,” Nigel snorts, before continuing to the kitchen. “I got you a fucking soda.”

“I don’t want it now, it’s too late. I won’t sleep,” says Adam, padding after. “I’ve had sex, Nigel.”

“Doing it on the computer doesn’t fucking count. Or to the computer. Or watching the computer -”

“You know nothing about me,” Adam points out suddenly, not angry, though his expression remains far from pleased. “You know nothing that I do on the computer, you actually tell me often how it’s best you don’t. You know nothing about the people in my life or the circumstances in which they have entered or left it. All you know is that I have Asperger’s, that I hired you to keep me safe, that I pay you to, and you are late.”

Adam’s fingers squeeze so hard against his arms that his knuckles go white, and he turns away before he’s unable to stop.

“Your contract has you here from seven in the evening until seven in the morning. You’re late by two hours. So you will stay another two to make up for it,” Adam tells him, pacing back to the computer. “I’m sure she can wait.”

At this, Nigel turns. He watches Adam narrowly, slow steps bringing him closer.

“How many fucking times, Adam? How many fucking times have I been late?”

“Twice.”

“Fucking twice. From the fucking Bronx. Every fucking day of the week, Adam, for six - seven fucking months,” Nigel says, lips drawn against his teeth. “Give me a fucking break, will you?”

“I don’t pay you for breaks,” Adam hisses. “I pay you to work.”

“That doesn’t mean you _fucking_ own me,” Nigel snarls. “Every night, I’m here. Every day, I have to force myself to sleep so I can come right back fucking down here again. I do nothing, Adam, nothing that doesn’t come back to you, and the first time I try to fucking enjoy myself, I get shit for it. I came, didn’t I? I’m fucking here. I just left a beautiful girl in bed alone to be here, with you. So go to fucking bed and let me work, since it’s all I’m fucking meant to do.”

Adam stares at him a moment, as bewildered as Nigel seems to be, before he shakes his head and sits deliberately down in his chair again.

“I have work to do,” he says, voice tight. “In half an hour I will need to take a shower before bed, as I always do. In that time, you should take yours. There is a spare towel in the bathroom hanging at the back of the door. It’s blue. You can use it.”

It’s a dismissal, a downright dismissal and it’s patronizing, it’s fucking infuriating that this kid has the gall to just -

“And what if I fucking don’t?” Nigel asks, as he pulls his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and drops them to the floor. His wallet follows, his burner phone. “You going to fucking fire me, Adam?”

“Not if you -”

“Shut up,” Nigel interrupts, as he jerks the buttons open on his shirt. “You’re a little prince, you know that? Up here in your high fucking tower, cloistered away from all the fucking peons. You tell me I don’t know shit about you -”

“You know very little.”

Lip curling, Nigel pulls his shirt from his shoulders and drops it, yanking off his belt next.

“I know you’re fucking lonely,” Nigel tells him. “You don’t pay me to be here fucking early because you’re worried. You pay me to be here so you can have a fucking friend,” he says, shoving his pants down to his ankles and clumsily stepping out of his shoes. He sets his thumbs to his briefs, and with narrowed eyes, drops those as well.

Adam watches him, eyes stoically, rather impressively, still on Nigel’s face only. He doesn’t slip them down to take Nigel in, he doesn’t turn away in embarrassment, though the heat in his cheeks says enough for that. After a moment, he swallows, a slow and deliberate motion, and turns to his computer again.

“Then be a friend,” Adam tells him quietly, hands working over the keys already at ridiculous speed, the space bar punched with such ferocity it makes the table shake.

“Maybe when you start to fucking treat me like one,” Nigel spits, “instead of a fucking servant at your fucking beck and call. Little prince.”

He turns to go, answered only by the clattering of keys. He doesn’t care about his shit left strewn across the floor, but he knows that Adam will mind it. It fills Nigel with a vicious pleasure. In the spare bedroom’s bath, nearly pulling the knob from the wall, he turns the shower on to hot and steps beneath it. The heat pulls a hiss from him as it spills across long, angry marks left by sharp fingernails.

God, it’s been fucking forever since he’s had a ferocious lover like Rhia. As in control as she was happy to give it up. Everything from her body, to the tattoos on it, to the way she smelled when they had collapsed to bed after the first time, panting and slick and spent… everything washes through Nigel’s mind as the water does over his body. Fucking gorgeous. Fucking crazy, too.

He wonders if she would welcome another visit, come morning. They’re both nocturnal creatures, and hardly exclusive, but Nigel would hardly say no.

He washes his hair and over his face, lets the water cascade over his shoulders and down his back, over his legs to his feet. The heat makes him drowsy, makes him want to return to the messy unmade bed in her surprisingly lavish apartment two blocks over rather than stay here and babysit a spoiled, heartless kid.

Whatever.

What the fuck ever.

When Nigel climbs out he uses the blue towel, as Adam had told him, drying off quickly before wrapping the thing around his waist and padding back to the living room, where Adam sits with one foot curled beneath him as he works. In the reflection behind him, code runs in parallel lines and quick flickers over all three screens. The window had months ago been blacked out by Nigel’s suggestion, appearing mere shaded from the outside and impossible to see through.

Adam looks up only briefly when Nigel passes him, and looks away again.

“I folded your clothes on the couch for you,” he tells him.

“Why?”

“Because they were on the floor.”

Nigel doesn’t have a smart remark for that, but neither is he in a hurry - reasonably settled now - to put himself back into them for the second night in a row. His bare feet click across the kitchen floor as he goes to the refrigerator, seeking out a glass of orange juice for himself. With a squint, he considers the soda, and decides against doing anything with it. Normally he’d put it in a glass with ice cubes, bring it to Adam and set it on the little coaster beside him, but the little prince’s ardent declarations still fucking sting and Nigel just shuts the ‘fridge instead.

“I still have five minutes,” he tells Adam, carrying his glass out to the balcony and scooping up his cigarettes along the way.

Adam watches him go and doesn’t move to stop him. But he does stop typing as soon as Nigel closes the door behind himself. He thinks of the anger, immediate and fiery, he thinks of the accusations and displeasure. He thinks of the way Nigel’s voice had sounded when he had moaned through the phone just an hour before, and how Adam’s heart had skipped knowing that was what he sounded like.

He swallows.

He knows he keeps Nigel here at ungodly hours for no reason other than his own paranoia. He knows that he should give him days off, weekends off, shorter hours… it would be fair. And yet the biting words that cling to him still like flakes of dusted glass are not wrong. He is lonely. He is lonely for friendship and conversation and company and comfort.

Adam swallows again and turns off the screen to the computer before standing to go and get his towel for his shower, Nigel still smoking half-naked on the balcony behind him.

Nigel waits until he hears Adam’s door shut, and only then - the street all but empty below - does he return. He drops his towel across the arm of the couch and slips back into his clothes. Pointless fucking shower considering he’s putting on the same sweaty shit he wore before. Pointless fucking shower considering Adam’s going to fucking bed anyway. Pointless fucking shower except that Adam was irrationally upset about Nigel’s getting laid, he realizes, fingers pausing before he zips up his jeans.

Everything Adam does has an internal logic to it. He’s rational to a fucking fault, so literal that even Nigel’s dumb jokes fall flat, and not only because they’re dumb. Nigel feels a jog spur his heart uneven as he listens to the shower run in Adam’s room. There’s a logic to this, too.

Adam wants a friend, but getting jealous over fucking is something else entirely.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Nigel tightens his grip just a bit, tugging Adam’s curls straight and tugging his voice into a sweet little sound that plucks resonant strings inside Nigel, vibrating down into his stomach. He searches Adam’s eyes, long lashes draping dark over brilliant blue - the cloudless sky above the sea in summer - and lips flushed to torrid pink._
> 
> _“Shut up,” Nigel whispers, before closing his mouth against Adam’s again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Nigel isn’t late again. Not really, anyway. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe fifteen, but he’s always there, within the fucking hour between seven and eight, at Adam’s door. It’s easier to drag yourself out of bed when you know you don’t have to commute from the fucking Bronx to get here. It’s also much fucking harder, having soft, warm hands try to coax him back to bed.

Less than a week and already Nigel has run out of excuses for why he can’t just blow this kid off and stay with Rhia overnight as well as during the day.

_I owe him._

_We have an arrangement._

_None of your fucking business._

All and every one are met with a grin, sly and beautiful, bottom lip working seamlessly between white teeth and eyes narrowing in a predator’s gaze. Then it becomes downright impossible to leave for another few minutes at least.

Nigel’s at least started bringing changes of clothes with him to Adam’s.

This evening, there is pizza on the table and a soda already bought by the fridge. Adam doesn’t look up from his computer when Nigel comes in, and just hums a quiet sound to show he has at least noticed him. Nigel sets his things down - a proper fucking bag now, with a change of clothes and a toothbrush and shit - and regards the spread in the kitchen.

“Did you eat?”

“I ordered food.”

Nigel feels a smile pull despite himself, watching Adam pick at the keys for a moment. He sits half-curled into his chair, one foot set against it and cheek against his knee. His hair curls into his eyes but he watches past, in a middle-distance, following hieroglyphic code, white on black for reams and reams of text. Nigel props open the pizza box, finding it untouched, and goes about setting down plates for them, the little space cups that held whiskey first for them, ice and soda in each.

With only a flicker of fight in him, quickly tamped, Nigel brings Adam’s cup to him and continues by.

“I’ll go shower.”

Adam just watches him, eyes up over the tops of his screens as Nigel makes his way to the spare room to shower, yanking his shirt over his head as he goes. Adam lets his eyes close as the door does, and imagines following Nigel in, letting his hands - pale compared to Nigel’s ruddy skin - seek over the scars scattered over his back, over the warm hair on his chest, lower to the taut but soft stomach...

Eyes open and lips pressed together, Adam unfolds himself in his chair and stretches, toes to the floor and hands up above his head. He allows a groan at the feeling, having kept himself entirely curled up until the pizza had been delivered - a note on the door indicating politely that it should be left on the doormat and that the payment and tip was beneath the mat for them - and then more curled still waiting for Nigel to get in.

And now he’s here, water sloshing over broad shoulders in a room so close to where Adam sits now.

He sighs.

It doesn’t matter.

It probably never did matter.

When Nigel returns, having bothered at least to put on pants and his plain white undershirt, he finds Adam at the table, coiled just as tight as he was at his desk. A brow lifts but Nigel merely takes his seat across from him, forcing his breath to steady with the snap of tension in the air, like electricity before the first clap of thunder.

“Eat,” Nigel finally tells him, as Adam blinks upward and lowers his thumb from between his teeth. It’s gentle when he says it, but does little to dissipate whatever’s pulled taut between them. “What’s the occasion? You hate take-out food. Delivery,” he corrects, before Adam can. “Whatever.”

“You like it,” Adam says, reaching for a slice only once Nigel has taken two for himself. He spends a predictably long time folding the stretched cheese carefully onto the slice of pizza so none of it touches the plate below, and wipes his hand on a napkin instead of licking it clean. He doesn’t eat even when Nigel starts, and the other doesn’t bother to tell him, again, to eat. He will in his own time - that, at least, he knows very well about Adam.

Adam considers his meal and then takes a breath, sitting up a little straighter in his chair, foot still drawn up but chin no longer resting on his knee.

“Would you sleep with me?” he asks. He watches as Nigel stops with the pizza halfway to his mouth and just stares at him. So Adam attempts to rephrase. “Do you find me sexually arousing?”

Nigel would have choked on his pizza had he managed a fucking bite. Instead, he slowly - very slowly - sets it back to the plate, and leans back into his chair to regard Adam at length. A breath draws short, and his brow creases.

“I’m not a fucking queer,” he answers. Adam parts his lips with his tongue and Nigel, goddammit, Nigel watches, feeling an unfamiliar heat spread beneath his eyes.

“That isn’t what I asked. Please just answer the questions I asked.”

“I can’t just -” Nigel begins, before stopping himself. All at once his thoughts flood with the little glances he’s taken without realizing, or without admitting to himself that he realized what he was doing. Adam curled sleepy and feline on the couch, lips parted on soft little breaths, on the several occasions Nigel’s brought him to bed. Adam’s hair in front of his eyes, begging to be tugged back. His skinny limbs and his rosy cheeks and -

Fuck.

 _Fuck_.

“You’re my employer,” Nigel finally manages.

Adam just sighs, letting his foot drop to the ground with his other, toes pressing to the cool floor.

“That isn’t an answer to either of the questions I asked,” Adam says. But he hardly sounds angry, he sounds, if anything, almost desperately resigned. For a moment all he does is kick his feet softly against the leg of his chair before sitting up to take up the piece of pizza and fold it to eat.

“I don’t think I’m queer either,” Adam responds, words muffled by the mouthful of dinner. He chews and swallows before continuing. “But I find you sexually arousing.”

Nigel sucks in a breath, sharp enough to fill his lungs and then released all at once. His brows furrow - dinner forgotten, Rhia forgotten, everything all at once wiped clean as everything he suspected is suddenly illuminated. He watches, too closely, as Adam brings a finger against his lips and drags it across, pressing his lips softly out of shape before taking up a napkin to press to them.

Here sits Adam, outwardly blithe but for the thrum of tension that Nigel can feel in the air like a heartbeat. Wide eyes filled with peculiar cleverness, a personality that Nigel has come to find a comfort in, open and honest and no more willing to accept masked words and hidden intentions than Adam is to create them himself. A spoiled little prince, beyond a fucking doubt, but one for whom Nigel has without protest gradually altered his entire fucking life.

And all at once the spiral into which Nigel has found himself hurtled gives way, and the rude awakening of reality returns.

Here sits Adam who pays Nigel’s bills.

Here sits Adam who sought him out and gave him work.

Here sits Adam who needs alert and aware protection from whomever the fuck he’s pissed off by digging into their business.

Nigel suddenly remembers the samurai, and bushido. Duty and honor above all else, at cost of one’s self to maintain those virtues. He is not here as a friend, no matter how much either of them want it to be so. And to be more than that -

Nigel takes a sip of his soda, and hunches forward over his food, eyes downcast.

“You’re late for your shower,” he tells him.

Adam takes a breath and releases it with a nod, slow and precise, before he sits forward to take up his pizza again. “I’m still hungry,” he says instead, turning the piece before biting into it, a deliberate slow push of his teeth. He chews, eyes in the middle distance, and swallows with a hum, taking up the napkin again to wipe his lips.

“I have never been good at human cues, I don’t understand them. They’re a different language to me. And I didn’t want to assume something and find it to be wrong so I thought I would ask,” he explains, lifting his eyes to Nigel again. “And because I remember that you don’t like having veiled things told to you either, and you would rather hear it straight, so I told you. You don’t have to do anything about it.”

Nigel huffs a little breath and shakes his head before he can stop himself from doing it. No, he doesn’t like to have things hidden from him. No, he’s honestly not much better than fucking Adam at reading people, so he channels it all into constant suspicion instead.

No, he doesn’t have to do anything about any of this. He can eat his fucking pizza and drink his fucking soda from the space-cup and let Adam go to fucking bed.

He can.

Instead he holds his breath, food yet untouched, and asks, “Do you _want_ that to happen? Finding you… fuck. Arousing. Fucking. _Fuck_ , Adam.”

Adam just watches him, slowly working his lip between his teeth to hold it there, folding his top lip over so he looks, suddenly, almost painfully young. He shrugs.

“I suppose I do. But I would rather it be something that you actually feel, not something that you feel you should feel because I brought this up. I know sometimes people allude or adjust or amend themselves to fit another’s wants, and that’s not fair. That’s not what I want.”

Adam smiles then, genuine and almost playful, before slipping his eyes to dinner again, away from Nigel before him. There is a beautiful blush beneath his eyes, highlighting freckles that are barely seen when Adam’s skin is just pale naturally. He blushed like this the last time he had a few glasses of whiskey, the last time they talked properly.

Adam doesn’t speak in nuance or half-truths. Adam has all but shut himself out of the world where those things exist. All that he is, entirely, is bared before Nigel now and even Nigel, in all his constant bullheaded fucking stubbornness, can’t help but see it and appreciate it.

And his ruddy blush.

And his hair in his fucking face again.

And the way he lifts his eyes to Nigel but only settles his gaze on him for a moment before it darts away again, like the little silvery fish in the creek that ran alongside Nigel’s childhood home in Romania.

 _Fuck_.

Nigel’s never noticed men before, not in the way he’s noticed women. There’s a similar sensation of wanting to conquer but in entirely different ways. He’s never fucked men before. He’s never wanted it. But Adam exists somewhere in-between, straddling the line between employer and friend, between obstacle and ally, between duty and desire.

“I haven’t -” Nigel stops, mustering a breath, fingernails drumming a report against the tabletop. “Have you thought of me that way? Before her. Alone. Whatever.”

A simple nod is enough that Nigel feels himself spiral, body coiling tight, cinching deep in the pit of his stomach. There’s something so wrong in the thought of Adam’s lips parting on a sigh not in sleep but in lust, his slender fingers curled around his cock, his back bent as he touches himself and whispers Nigel’s name. After all their bickering, all their snapped words and impatience…

Nigel’s never been very good at sticking to what’s right.

Bushido be damned.

“I don’t know,” Nigel finally manages. “I don’t fucking know, Adam. To answer both of your fucking questions, I don’t -”

He stands, chair jerking back with a shrill screech against the floor. Adam tilts his head at the sound, swallowing a mouthful of soda. Fuck it, just fuck it, if Adam fires him it’s for the fucking best, and if he has him stay then at least Nigel will know. He strides the length of the table in two steps and pushes Adam’s fucking hair back out of his eyes, grasping soft curls between his fingers as he bends his head back and kisses him soundly.

Adam makes a sound, a fluttering and weak little thing, his hands clenched, one on the table one against his own leg, eyes closed tight in surprise and blush, the fucking blush darker still than before. When Nigel pulls back, Adam makes another of those weak little noises and it’s almost too damn much, watching him flicker his eyes open, lips still parted to breathe, surprised and confused and delighted all at once.

“That felt very decisive,” Adam whispers, licking his lips and swallowing, eyes flicking between Nigel’s own, turning his head just slightly into the hand that holds his hair. “A very decisive ‘I don’t know’.”

Adam’s heart hammers quick, and Nigel can see the pulse in Adam’s throat work and flutter. He’s so innocent, suddenly, childish in this awe with which he watches Nigel as though he has never seen anyone so interesting or remarkable. It’s the most gratifying feeling, being looked at that way, by someone who does not lie, cannot lie, cannot abide it.

Adam takes a long breath and lets it out again, slowly. “I need more than a decisive ‘I don’t know’,” Adam tells him. “I need… I need something. One way or another, Nigel, please. I know you’re worried because I’m your employer, and I know you are sleeping with someone and that’s hardly fair if you are and you like her and she likes you and I just told you something to make that complicated. I didn’t want it to be complicated. It shouldn’t be. And I just need you to know that. That it doesn’t have to be. That you can just… I can shower, and you can stay here and then you can go in the morning to the woman you’re seeing and I can sit and figure out which hours of yours to cut so that you can see her more, because -”

“Adam,” Nigel breathes, voice plummeting to a low purr.

“- I don’t want you to feel obligated. You’ve worked very hard and done nearly everything I’ve asked, except for being late a few times, and you said yourself that -”

“ _Adam_.”

“- I don’t own you and if you need your own life outside of here, or want it -”

Nigel tightens his grip just a bit, tugging Adam’s curls straight and tugging his voice into a sweet little sound that plucks resonant strings inside Nigel, vibrating down into his stomach. He searches Adam’s eyes, long lashes draping dark over brilliant blue - the cloudless sky above the sea in summer - and lips flushed to torrid pink.

“Shut up,” Nigel whispers, before closing his mouth against Adam’s again. The force of it is nearly enough to topple the little prince from his throne, but Nigel releases his hair and snares Adam around the waist instead. Bending over him, leaning Adam back, Nigel tastes sweet soda from Adam’s tongue as it sweeps against his own, delicate lips trapped and spreading willing under his own rough mouth.

He grabs the table with his free hand to stop them both from falling, blood flowing fast to flush thick in his cock so quickly that it leaves him dizzy. Skilled fingers - fingers that Nigel has watched for hours upon hours tap secret missives across the keys - snare in his shitty cheap undershirt and curl into fists. It’s a desire so sweet, so genuine, that Nigel’s resistance falters in a fucking cataclysm with each twist of their mouths together.

Adam breaks to breathe first, panting and flushed and trembling where Nigel holds him. He had wanted this, yes, had thought of it, yes, often, but he had never imagined that it would ever feel this good. There is something entirely powerful about Nigel, something strong and charismatic and raw and brutal about him that Adam has never experienced with anyone else before. He swallows, leans close to rest his forehead against Nigel’s and keeps ahold of his shirt, hands clasped around it so tight it actually hurts him, and only then Adam slowly forces his fingers to relax. Breaths hitch and quick and uncontrolled, and Adam laughs, soft, barely heard, and turns his face against Nigel’s.

It’s overwhelming. It’s too new.

He needs to think.

“I’m going to go take a shower,” Adam whispers.

Nigel sighs against Adam’s cheek, nuzzling alongside his nose. Higher, then, to his hairline and into the silky curls that have held him in such fascination that Nigel has wondered, when shaking himself from his daze, if he’d not accidentally become so drunk that he couldn’t stop studying them. He breathes in deep the clean, crisp scent of the little prince who holds him close, lips parted against his cheek.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Nigel asks.

Adam sets his teeth to his bottom lip and holds it for a moment before releasing. He draws back enough to search Nigel’s face, and then shakes his head.

“You’ve already had a shower,” Adam says, and the sound Nigel makes is less a laugh than a sound of raw desperation. He leans back and drags his lips softly against Adam’s mouth, pressing into another kiss before he tugs him upright and straightens himself. Half-hard, cock filling with every beat of Nigel’s pulse, he tries to fucking steady himself as he steps back.

“You’re late for it,” he says, jaw flexing tight before he turns towards the counter to seek out his cigarettes, twisting the plastic off the fresh pack with a quick turn of his fingers.

Adam watches him, his own heart hammering, cheeks pink and body responsive as it has not been in a long time, if ever. He feels buzzed, energized in the most primal way, and suddenly the want to stick to a routine gets overpowered by wanting to try this instead.

Novel and new and strange and wonderful.

He follows Nigel with his eyes as he goes to the balcony, adjusting himself in his pants before he curses softly and cups his hand around the cigarette to light it. Adam can't help but smile. They are similar, really, despite the glaring differences. Both return to the comfort and safety of familiar things when strangeness assaults them.

So Adam goes to shower.

He does not take his time as he normally would, he rinses his hair quickly, cleans himself and steps out to brush his teeth. Hair dripping down his back and towel wrapped around his waist, he goes to change, into over-long and soft sleep pants and a worn shirt.

In the living room, Nigel is on the couch, magazine in hand, concentrating far too hard on a picture of an engine, and Adam has to smile. He looks a moment more before padding softly towards him and sinking to his knees before Nigel on the couch. When he sits up, his lips brush the warm stubble at Nigel’s jaw, then the corner of his lips, and then he kisses them properly.

Adam smiles when he pulls away, nose wrinkling as he opens just one eye first.

"I've never tasted mint and tobacco before," he admits.

Nigel’s jaw works, throat clicking as he swallows. Another kiss against the corner of his mouth as he turns away both eases the tension and worsens it, a pit in the bottom of his belly. “We should talk about this.”

“Okay,” Adam agrees. He holds his bottom lip in his mouth, tongue tracing it, and Nigel watches the color of it flush glossy red when it’s released. “It’s warm but also cool. It reminds me a little of Christmas.”

“Christmas.”

“The way you taste. Like fireplaces and peppermint cookies.”

“That isn’t what I -” Nigel lifts a hand and cuts his own words short. It’s when Adam rests his cheek in Nigel’s palm that Nigel nearly drops his magazine, wrinkling the pages as he snares it tighter. He curls his hand against Adam’s cheek, and allows the stroke of a thumb across the pale rose blooming beneath his eyes.

This isn’t bushido. Nigel’s not a fucking samurai - he doesn’t even have a sword. And though Adam conquers unseen territories, pillaging their resources or holding them hostage, he isn’t a fucking warlord.

Nigel thinks of chivalry instead.

He thinks of those knights who swore allegiance to a ruler and those who swore it to the church. And there were those who instead swore service to their lady, revered above all others, vowing to keep them and their holdings safe from infidels. Nigel likes those poems, men who would spill the blood of others or themselves in exchange for less still than Nigel has now, with Adam’s cheek satin-soft and warm beneath his hand. Nigel likes those women, too, lofty and untouchable to everyone but their sworn protectors, and usually even then, their mere existence enough to drive men willingly to war. Helen of Troy. Betty Grable.

Fucking Adam.

Nigel snorts at the thought and grins, suddenly, Adam’s smile widening in turn.

“You taste like toothpaste,” Nigel tells him, eyes still crinkled in the corners as he watches the little prince knelt at his feet.

"Of course. I just brushed my teeth," Adam points out. There is an innocence to him that is entirely endearing, and entirely genuine. This boy, this kid who can bring corporations to their knees for millions of dollars, sits before Nigel now like someone who was just gifted a puppy.

"When I go to sleep," Adam says, pulling back just a little, rolling his shoulders in a stretch. "Will you have coffee, and smoke more cigarettes and check the locks and read my books?"

Nigel snorts, tilting his head and shrugging at the same time. An allowance for the inevitable.

"And in the morning just before I leave my room at seven will you mutter to yourself in Romanian and tidy up the kitchen before you grunt a morning greeting to me?"

Nigel’s smile warms his face, narrows his eyes, and he nods, enough for Adam to smile more.

"And then will you pack up your bag - you carry a proper bag now - and rub your eyes and mumble something about not being late even though you will be, and that's okay, and go and spend the day with the woman you like?"

There is no accusation there, no coy wheedling to get a response, Adam is entirely genuine in asking, his smile still there, almost hopeful that Nigel will say yes to following this part of his routine too.

Nigel parts his lips with his tongue and sighs. “Should I?”

“If you want to, yes,” Adam shrugs, and therein lies the fucking problem. Asked an hour before, Nigel would have not only agreed to this plan, but ardently declared a number of things he planned to do to Rhia as soon as he was back in her bed. Instead he sits now in stasis, wary of this new complication and like a predator approaching new territory, uncertain how to proceed.

“No,” he finally decides. “I don’t know. Not tonight. Today. Tomorrow, I mean, fuck it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m fucking exhausted,” Nigel admits, tossing the magazine aside as he leans back into the couch, and squeezing his fingers against his eyes. “You’re both fucking exhausting. I need to sleep and figure out what the fuck I’m doing with my life.”

Adam watches him, then sits closer and sets his hands to Nigel's knees to lever himself off the floor.

"Okay," he says quietly, pulling the shirt up over his shoulder again where it's slipped down. "You should sleep. But not now, you're working now." Another grin, bright, and Adam turns to go to his room, leaving the door open this time, not even a pretense of pushing it most of the way closed. He shuffles around arranging the blankets before padding back out to Nigel again.

"You can take the spare room," Adam tells him. "If you want. So you don't have to travel so far."

Nigel groans quietly and shakes his head, still rubbing away the headache at the back of his skull, and Adam shrugs, uncaring one way or the other.

"Good night," he tells him, and this time when he goes to his room he crawls right into bed and is out cold within moments.

\---

Nigel doesn’t see her for days, and when he does, it’s by coincidence.

Coincidence seems to happen a lot with her, and Nigel slows his steps down the sidewalk, a few blocks off yet from Adam’s apartment.

“Nigel,” she calls out, smile curving feline. “So good to see you again. It’s been a while.”

He lifts a brow and watches how her body bends as she leans against an old brick pillar, fingers wrapped around the snarling maw of a stone lion. “It’s been three - four fucking days,” Nigel allows.

“Everything alright?”

“Fine,” he says, tracking the movement of a car down the quiet side street. “You?”

“Worried,” she answers, before shaking her head. “No, not worried. I’m concerned.”

“About what?”

“About you,” Rhia says, tongue darting against her lips, painted violet-red. She’s got her sunglasses on again and Nigel watches his own reflection as his lighter flares and smoke obscures his face. It’s unsettling to not see her eyes, wide and dark, but not nearly as unsettling as the subtle vibrations in the air between them. “And him.”

Nigel blinks, releasing a long puff of smoke before taking the cigarette out from between his lips.

"Who?" he asks, and hopes it sounds as gruff and indifferent as he wishes it actually was. Rhia just grins, bringing a hand to her face and gently biting the side of her fingernail. And she is lovely, despite the unease Nigel can feel clawing at his throat, she is truly lovely.

"The little genius whose balcony you saved me from,” she says. "Very, very loyal, Nigel, not to leave him even to save a damsel in distress."

"That's fucking rich."

Rhia laughs then, that purring warm sound, and moves to step closer. "Alright, maybe not a damsel, but I am the jealous type."

Nigel grunts, shoves the filter between his lips again. "Not my fucking problem."

“Exactly,” she says, offering a wide smile as she wraps her hand around the strings of his hooded sweatshirt and bends him close, lips brushing his. “So we’re on the same page, then.”

“We’re not even in the same fucking book,” he snorts, sweeping her hand away only to find himself held by the back of the neck instead. Resistance snaps tight through him, snarled with desire and an innate appreciation for how fucking rough she can be. There’s few things in the world Nigel enjoys as much as a gorgeous girl who can leave a fucking bruise.

“You can’t be a hero to everyone,” she tells Nigel, eyes flashing over the top of her glasses as he sets his free hand to her waist. “Eventually, you’ll end up an enemy to both.”

Nigel’s lips curl against his teeth in a grin. His heartbeat quickens, blood thickening, voice low. “Is that a threat?”

Pursing her lips, she shakes her head, brows lifting. “Doesn’t have to be. It could just be fair warning.”

“The fucker that put his hands on you -”

“Trying to find the path of least resistance.”

“You’re a fucking piece of work,” he rumbles, with no small amount of delight in the realization of it.

Rhia's smile stretches lazy. "And you like it."

Nigel just snorts, says nothing. It is clear enough how much he liked it, how much he still does, in truth, fucked up as it is. To give due credit, she is a feisty bitch, and clever.

"One hour," she purrs against him. "Maybe two, that's all I need."

"To do what?"

"That would be spoiling it," she grins. "What's he to you, Nigel? Five and a half grand a month? In my line of work that's a daily perk. Should be in yours, too, for how hard you work for that ungrateful boy."

Nigel’s jaw works. He thinks of the threat and promise of Adam’s words the first day of the damn interview. He will wipe Nigel from the map, end him in every and any line of work, bring up skeletons from the deep that really don't belong on the surface.

"I'm late for work," he tells Rhia quietly, and extricates himself from elegant hands. She lets him go with fingernails drawn down his chest, and turns as he steps past.

“Doesn’t have to be with me,” she says. “Simple as going for a walk. Shit happens, Nigel. And it can be over and done with or cause a whole world of hurt.”

He holds a choice finger up over his shoulder in response and she laughs into her hand. She snorts a little when she does, and goddammit, it’s fucking cute. Nigel strides a little quicker, and lights a fresh cigarette with the remains of the older one.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I’m a healthy weight and height for my demographic - Nigel!”_
> 
> _The exclamation comes as Nigel wraps an arm around Adam’s waist, lifting him easily from his chair. He hoists Adam over his shoulder, and with a grunt to settle him, heads for the phone._
> 
> _“Maybe a little heavy,” Nigel grins. “Too much fucking soda, Adam.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our amazing [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Adam’s quick to the door when Nigel arrives, but not as quick to step back when he pushes past and locks the door behind. He drops his bag on the floor and unzips his sweatshirt, keeping his shoes on as he goes.

“Staying the night,” Nigel says. “Day. Fucking - sleeping here.”

They haven’t kissed again since that night - well, Nigel hasn’t. He’s accepted, stoic beneath nervous and eager little things accompanied by fluttering fingers and a warm brush of lips against his own. It’s been one-sided, but when Adam seems satisfied to be allowed his own affections, Nigel doesn’t see the need to push it.

Not that he hasn’t thought about it.

At great length, to his fucking chagrin, with a hand between his legs. Every fucking night since, attempts to sleep are shaken awake by the memory of grateful sighs against his cheek and uncertain hands against his hair. It started as an experiment, jerking off like that, for Nigel to determine whether or not he could even make himself bend that way. He’s never fucked men, he’s never fucking wanted to. To his dismay, the thoughts have come to him with alarming ease, and he’s come easily in turn.

“Okay,” Adam says, smile comfortable against his features before he goes back to his computer. “It might allow for more sleep since you won’t have to travel anywhere, and you can sleep from seven ‘til seven without interruption.”

Nigel sighs and goes to the kitchen to set his things away. Coffee. Whiskey. A couple of frozen meals to hold him over. Soda.

He feels like he hasn’t slept in weeks.

More and more, Rhia’s words filter and turn in his mind. Just an hour. Accidents happen. Who is Adam to him anyway? An instinct tugs at Nigel to tell Adam, to ask if he knows of Rhia at all, though he’s fairly sure that’s not her fucking real name. Maybe if Adam knows he can be prepared for it, close whatever things on his damn computer need to be closed, sell whatever the hell else needs selling. And then what? Have Adam on edge with his gun he’s never fired before and his inability to comprehend things in anything but logic?

No.

It’s Nigel’s job to keep him protected from this. Physical attacks and panic attacks that smell like an oncoming storm and too-ripe fruit. Protection is more than just taking a bullet for someone, more than being willing to go toe-to-toe. It’s as much providing a peace of mind as any of that shit, and increasingly why Nigel suspects he’s here at all.

To be calm.

Collected.

Assertive and assured.

He feels a little better by the time his water’s hot enough to mix with the spoonfuls of grainy instant coffee, and he carries the mug with him as he makes his rounds. He checks the latches and seals on the windows, and peers through their tinted glass to the street below. Every room given a studious looking-over, more familiar to Nigel now than anywhere he’s lived in years. Nothing out of order. Nothing out of place.

And so long as he’s here, that’s how it will fucking stay.

Adam continues his endless clicking as Nigel moves around the place. He doesn’t disturb the kid and Adam doesn’t disturb him. There is a strange comfort in the company, no pressure there to do anything. Adam, although entirely affectionate now, does not feel imposing with it. It merely is. And Nigel just doesn’t know what the fuck to do about it.

“There’s been some backlash on the server today,” Adam says after a while. Upon checking, Nigel sees he’s been here over an hour. His coffee’s cold. “It happens sometimes. Just means I have to stay up later. But it won’t bother me if you watch television or read while I’m still here.”

Nigel drinks his bitter coffee in one long swill and goes to make more, filling the kettle again. “What kind of backlash?”

“Probing for security weaknesses, strange password-cracking attempts from proxied IP addresses, clumsy things,” Adam rattles off, and continues to rattle, as Nigel lets the cool blue tone of his voice ease himself in turn. He isn’t panicked, he’s not upset, and at the moment, Nigel couldn’t want for more than that.

“Sounds scary,” Nigel allows, gently interjecting as he returns, steaming mug of crappy coffee in hand.

“It isn’t. It’s only a concern if it works. It isn’t unusual for people to get curious.”

“People like you.”

Adam nods and wraps his arms around his knee, foot in his chair again, and hands returning to the computer.

“Why rob a bank when you can steal from the one who’s already robbed it,” Nigel ventures, taking his seat on the arm of the couch nearest to Adam. “Let them do the work for you.”

Adam hums, lets his eyes slip from the screen to Nigel for a moment, still just looking past him, though once in a while his gaze lingers too long instead.

“They can try,” he agrees. “But it would be easier to rob a bank. Their security systems are terrible. Slowly getting better, but it cost them millions in the process.”

Nigel snorts and Adam smiles. It’s incredible how playful he can be in his dryness, in his logic and pedantic detail. It’s remarkable how expressive Adam actually is when someone takes the time to pay attention. Now Nigel finds he can do little but that, every damn time he’s here.

“Few people want money from me,” Adam adds, mumbling against his knee as he slowly scrolls through something on screen and then adds another list or column or some shit to it to expand it even further. Nigel just blinks at him. “Money comes and goes, information is worth much more. Secrets. Scandals. Insecurities.”

Nigel isn’t surprised by this. Money can fix more problems than it causes, and the more problems that Adam can find mucking about in people’s passwords and private systems, the greater the tribute to keep those details from going any further. It’s as dangerous as anything Nigel’s ever done, but less an immediate burn than a slow boil.

He watches as Adam’s shoulders curve forward, so close to the screen that it gives Nigel a headache to even watch. He can’t fucking imagine sitting there all day like that, he’d rather rob a dozen fucking banks than live how Adam lives. Adam’s squint pulls a sharp pain into Nigel’s brow in sympathy. With a sip and a sigh, Nigel sets his mug aside on the desk and stands. Stretching tired fingers, joints swollen always from being battered so many times, Nigel’s hands are fracture-gnarled but strong. He sets them to Adam’s shoulders and gently pries him back into his seat, sweeping his thumbs against his shoulders to soften up the mustard-yellow tension in Adam’s muscles.

“Do you do this because you enjoy it?” Nigel asks. “Or because you have to?”

Adam shivers at the touch and squirms a little at the sensation, but he doesn’t tell Nigel to stop. He just sits and lets him touch, lets himself feel this properly - good but a little painful, but after the pain, good again.

“I did it for my dad,” Adam says after a while, tapping a few keys to apparently set the screensaver going with things working in the background. “He got very sick, and couldn’t go to work and we were going to lose the house.”

Adam can feel the tension in Nigel when he speaks, and so he keeps going. Might as well get it all out before the questions start, answer them before they’re asked.

“He had cancer. Cancer costs a lot of money. We were in and out of hospital a lot, and every appointment costs more than most people can ever afford, even just sitting in the ER. So I started to figure out how to get money by working from home so I could look after him. Computers make sense to me, they always have. So I started seeing what they could tell me. I sold the first piece of information for a company a month in, and it was enough to cover his visits for a while, so I kept doing it.”

Adam swallows, leans a little more into Nigel’s touches, which now shift to just soothe over his shoulders. Adam wonders why that’s the response, always, to comfort, to reassure. He is upset his dad is gone but death happens, to everyone eventually. He can’t fear something so inevitable, he can’t linger on something he can’t change. He shrugs, just softly.

“The problem is that once you start you can’t get out, people know your alias, they know where to go for information, to buy it or keep it safe. They look for you and if you’re gone, news gets out that you’re out there for the taking should anyone have a vendetta. A lot of people have a vendetta against me now, I’ve sold a lot of information.”

“So you pull new information to keep them in line,” Nigel says. “Afraid.”

“Aware,” Adam says instead, leaning a little towards Nigel’s touch as he skims his thumbs up and down along Adam’s neck.

“Like letting it be known you’ve got heat. A gun,” Nigel clarifies, “even if you don’t have it on you at the time - far as they know, you might. And sure as shit stops them from coming around your place.”

“Something like that,” agrees Adam. He tilts his head back and Nigel meets his eyes, upside down, as he smooths Adam’s curls back from his eyes.

“Sorry about your dad.”

Adam’s lips purse and relax again in a semblance of a shrug. “He was comfortable,” he replies. “We had home care for him at the end, all the equipment that could be kept here was here, a nice nurse used to come by every morning to help him take his medication and go through his chart with me.”

With a sigh, Adam closes his eyes and drops his head forward again, opening them to look at the keys. He has been doing this for years, now, tired of it entirely. He wishes, some days, that he could just curl up and not do anything at all. Cut ties with the underworld, change his name, change his life, grow old amidst books and comfort and silence.

But he knows that’s not how life works.

“Do you do this because you enjoy it?” Adam asks him after a while.

Rather than try to work loose the pervasive knots in Adam’s shoulders, Nigel simply keeps his hand in Adam’s hair instead. Soft strokes each with a gentle tug, enough to straighten his silken curls and let them bounce back again. He takes a deep breath and sighs it long in thought.

“I do it because I’m fucking good at it,” Nigel says. “And because I’m shit at pretty much everything else. The work pays enough to let me forget that sometimes, fucking or drinking, whatever.”

Adam makes a little sound and Nigel’s hand stills immediately, then slowly resumes.

“There’s parts of it I like,” he admits. “I don’t mind fighting. Hell, sometimes I fucking downright enjoy it. I like the respect that comes along with it, when it comes along.”

“It doesn’t always?”

Nigel snorts, eyes drawing up in amusement. “More often whoever’s hired me treats me like a dog. Worse than, usually. I put up with it when I need the money. I don’t when I don’t. But pompous pricks think I’ll bark on command and use it to feel fucking superior,” he says, with a mild shrug. “I just imagine how easy it would be to -” He stops, shakes his head, and doesn’t finish that fucking sentence. “I’m not smart like you are,” Nigel tells Adam. “But you don’t have to be clever to be brave. Works better if you’re not.”

Adam swallows softly. “I wish I was brave,” he says. “There are many types of smart, book smart and street smart and peoplesmart. Some who know mathematics and others who know languages. They are all differently smart. You are, Nigel, you’re smarter than you allow yourself to think and that’s not fair. You need to know you are.” Adam sits forward again, displacing the mouse so the screensaver goes away. “There’s only one type of brave, and I don’t have that,” he adds.

Nigel lets his hand drop to the back of Adam’s chair, and ignoring the fussy sound he makes, he turns it slowly so Adam faces him, setting his hands on the arms. When Nigel smiles he doesn’t have to force it, it’s small but genuine, just enough for Adam to see.

“Taking care of your dad is fucking brave. Getting into this shit,” he says, nodding towards the computer, “is brave.”

“It isn’t the same.”

“There’s a difference between brave and foolhardy,” Nigel tells him. “I’ve got enough of the fucking latter for both of us.”

Adam’s smile is very small but it’s there. He nods, just once, shrugs, turns his eyes away from Nigel so he doesn’t have to see how shiny they suddenly are. No one has ever thought Adam brave before, including Adam himself.

“Did you want to get dinner?”

“Delivered?”

“I have nothing to make it with,” Adam points out, and Nigel snorts.

“Yeah, and I can’t fucking cook anything. You’ll get fat eating take-out like you do, and living on soda. I've got no fucking clue how you’re so fucking tiny.”

“I’m not tiny.”

“You’re fucking tiny.”

Adam frowns but there is such joy in that expression. He tilts his chin, proud, and haughtily looks towards the phone, implication clear. Nigel spares it a glance, then turns his eyes back to Adam, watching him from their corners.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No.”

“That you’re fucking tiny.”

“I’m a healthy weight and height for my demographic - Nigel!”

The exclamation comes as Nigel wraps an arm around Adam’s waist, lifting him easily from his chair. He hoists Adam over his shoulder, and with a grunt to settle him, heads for the phone.

“Maybe a little heavy,” Nigel grins. “Too much fucking soda, Adam.”

“Put me down.” It’s a groan, and Adam hides his face in his hands as Nigel carries him, seemingly without effort at all, to keep the blush on his cheeks only, not running like spilled wine down his chest as well. “This is embarrassing.”

Nigel just takes up the phone and dials from memory, holding Adam comfortably with one arm as he settles the phone between shoulder and ear and makes their usual order. “On the corner, yeah. No, hold the soda, this one’s had too much already.”

“Nigel!”

“Ignore him. Yep. Corner. Thirty minutes? Good. It’ll be cash. Thanks.”

“Nigel.” A groan now and Adam lays lax over Nigel’s broad shoulder, hands skimming absently over and over his back. “You’re terrible.”

Nigel clicks the phone off and sets it back in its receiver. “And you?”

“Nauseous,” Adam says, but it’s with a snort of laughter that he tries to muffle, hands curled around Nigel’s waist.

He goes to get his mug, Adam hanging across his shoulder, and returns to the kitchen to start another coffee. A slight adjustment settles the backs of Adam’s knees beneath Nigel’s arm and he holds him as he fills the kettle and sets it to heat with his free hand.

“Besides that,” Nigel says. Adam whines, he bites his lip and he shakes his head, and finally releases his breath in a huff.

“Tiny.”

“Correct,” grins Nigel, carrying him back to his chair again.

Adam groans again and sighs, but doesn’t struggle as Nigel carries him around a moment more. When he sets him down, it’s with care, and Adam immediately runs his hands through his hair to try and even it down again, blush bright not only from being carried upside down but from the fact that Nigel lifted him so easily at all.

Adam lets his mind explore that in silence as he turns back to the computer, attempting to pretend he’s busy and untouchable as Nigel waits for the kettle to boil and makes yet another coffee.

Nigel checks the time, standing content in the kitchen as he drinks his coffee and the click of keys begins to fill the air again. There’s never music here, not once has Nigel seen the TV used. Adam offers it now and again, but even to Nigel - a natural-born fucking disruption - it seems like it would be out of place to suddenly throw on a match while Adam’s so focused.

And he is, always, and quickly again now, fingertips tapping an orderly pattern against his thumb before he sets them to the keys once more. Nigel wonders if he’ll ever be able to hear that sound again without thinking of Adam, or drink shitty acrid instant coffee, or smell plain orange soap without tasting Adam’s name on his tongue. His memories always form quickly, one way in which Nigel’s not mostly stupid - he has a quick eye for faces and people, for the colors and scents that misalign in his mind. It’s like a connection of cords plugged to the wrong ports, sounds that carry taste, names that look like colors, faces that have a particular scent to them. But even wrong, the memories stick.

And Adam is in his mind for good.

“Got to go pick up the food,” Nigel tells him. “Alright for a few?”

Adam looks up, a shrug small and a smile smaller still on his lips before he looks away again, smiling wider when Nigel grunts his reply and goes to the door, letting it close and click locked behind him. He doesn’t take a key. He doesn’t have one.

Outside, it’s chilly but not freezing, and although Nigel laments not taking a sweater, it won’t harm him in the long run. It’s quiet here, at night, unlike his neighbourhood which seems to wake after dark, with arguments and too many bodies crammed into one space. He goes to the corner and waits, as always, lights up and breathes a cloud of smoke towards the trees, as always. The food arrives with the same kid, the same smile, the same argument over a tip that Nigel wins, and a curse from him once the kid leaves and Nigel finds a handful more fortune cookies in the bag that were tossed in for free. He takes his time strolling back, another cigarette allowed to dissolve heat against his lungs. The bag crackles in the breeze as Nigel swings it. It’s nice here, really, and the job not half bad, considering.

If only he could get his damn mind in order. If only shit would make fucking sense.

He rounds the corner and flicks the cigarette butt into the bushes, taking the stairs and pinging the code for the door. The small flight of stairs he takes two at a time, and when he reaches to knock on the door, he finds it open. That in itself is enough to have his entire body fill with cold adrenaline. But there is no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle from what he can see through the small crack the door allows. He swallows, sets the bag down silently and pulls his own gun from his belt to push the door open with.

Within, there is no mess, there is no blood, there is just the sound of quick panicked panting and the smell of ozone that, on anyone, is never, ever good. There is a rustle and Nigel turns, gun on the ready, to find Adam pointing his own back at him, eyes wide and blue, tears already streaked down his cheeks where they had fallen, most likely entirely outside of Adam’s control. The kid stands frozen, lips parted and chest heaving and hands trembling and gun shuffling every which way.

“Nigel.” His voice is so small, so, so small, and with another little sound, Adam lowers the gun and brings a hand to his face to press to his eyes, shaking where he stands.

Nigel palms Adam’s gun from him as he passes by, finding it easily released. He keeps his own uplifted as he sidesteps to the kitchen, circles to check Adam’s room, rounds back to the hallway and the spare bedroom and finds no one there. Nothing out of place. Nothing moved.

A hitched breath draws him back and he sets Adam’s gun aside, checking the hallway outside the apartment.

Nothing.

No one.

A sharp curse in Romanian snaps free some of the tension thudding dull and heavy in his ears, every muscle twitching electric, the taste of metal on his tongue. He didn’t see anyone leave, he’d have noticed someone coming out of the brownstone.

“Where did they go?” Nigel snarls. “Where the fuck did they go, Adam?”

Adam just takes a deep breath, another one, and seeks back with his hand until he finds a wall and then he slips down it to the floor, curling into a ball and pressing his hands to his ears, rocking himself over and over.

“Adam -”

“Stop talking,” Adam whispers, rocking faster as Nigel comes nearer. “You’re hurting my ears, stop talking!”

Nigel has never seen him this way before, Adam is entirely not himself, his voice is rough, his body is tense, he’s walled himself up into a tiny cage he refuses to get out of and all Nigel can do is curse again, loudly, and pace outside again.

No one, nothing, not a shred of any sort of evidence beyond Adam and his iron-bitter panic. Nigel snares the take-out bag and slams the door closed and locks it, setting the bag to the ground again and his gun aside and moving to kneel beside Adam.

“Adam.”

“I don’t know,” he whispers. “I don’t know where they went because I don’t know where they came from. They knocked and I thought it was you and I opened the door and it wasn’t and they just came in and started talking and telling me to stop and that they would find a way to make me if I didn’t and they talked about you and -”

Nigel could burn the entire fucking building to the ground with himself inside it for this. He listens past the flurry of Adam’s words, tries to tune his attention to the space around them. There’s no one here, now. Now there’s no one fucking here but them but there were people here, plural, fucking more than one, and they’re fucking gone and Adam is shaking beneath Nigel’s hand on his shoulder.

“Breathe,” Nigel tells him, voice scarcely raised above a hissed snarl. He pulls Adam against him, into his lap when he sits, holding tighter around Adam even as little fists pound against his chest, his jaw, Nigel takes it and he holds on. Squeezing Adam close, Nigel rocks him, the same way he saw Adam rocking himself, and he presses his mouth to Adam’s hair and breathes warmth there.

It’s meant to be reassuring.

He hopes it’s fucking reassuring.

“You’re okay,” Nigel tells him. “I’m here and you’re okay. You got your gun and they left and they won’t fucking come back, Adam, I fucking swear it, not without -”

He forces his words to stop and his eyes to close, sighing rough against Adam’s hair. Adam makes a frightened little whining sound and goes lax against Nigel, clinging to him now instead of beating him away from himself. He holds as long as Nigel holds him, he forces his breathing to start to even, and only when it does, does he gently shove against Nigel so the man releases his death grip on him.

“They talked about you,” Adam says again, bringing up a hand to wipe his eyes, lashes thick still with tears. “They said… they said Rhia wanted you to see something, and if you didn’t want to see it they would show me instead and it would be something I would be interested in seeing but I don’t want to see anything, I don’t want them to show me anything, Nigel. Who’s Rhia?”

It’s Nigel now who can’t fucking breathe. It just stops, knotted in his throat, his heart beating deafening in his ears. He lifts a hand to thumb away the wetness on Adam’s cheeks, he smooths his hair back from his face and finds his hand held.

Adam meets his eyes, for an instant, but longer than he has before and Nigel can only shake his head.

“The girl I was fucking,” he admits, lip curling as he forces himself to swallow. “Was, Adam, fucking was.”

Adam blinks at him, wide eyes curious and brow furrowing in displeasure, in confusion, before he just shakes his head.

“Did you make a sex tape?” Adam asks him, bewildered, and Nigel can’t help but laugh. It’s the most ridiculous thing, the most outrageous and entirely logical conclusion for Adam to come to, and even with the tension between them, all he can do is laugh. “Did you? That would be stupid, Nigel, and very hard to get off the internet.”

“More than fucking one,” Nigel mutters, pressing his palm to Adam’s cheek and sweeping it across his brow to hold his hair back. “But not with her. Unless she filmed it and I didn’t know, or -”

Or someone else did.

Fuck.

“You’ll be fucking disappointed,” Nigel snorts, finally mustering up a smile again. “Doesn’t look much like the fucking magazines.”

“The pictures in the magazines look uncomfortable,” Adam mumbles, but he turns his head into the palm that touches him like a cat would, seeking comfort from the larger, gruff man before him. He swallows, still trembling but intermittently now, not painfully, not enough to make him sick. Adam wipes his eyes again.

“They were so calm,” he says, whispering. “They didn’t do anything, they didn’t hurt me, but they said they would if I didn’t stop. That you would, if I found out the thing they want to show me. I told them to go away but they wouldn’t, not until they got a call and said you were at the corner and then they left.” Adam shrugs, shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know who sent them, I can’t even change it if I tried or wanted to.”

“Change what, Adam?” Nigel asks, keeping his hand on Adam’s cheek when he nuzzles against it again.

“Any of this. Whatever - whatever it is they want from me, everything’s done, I’m not holding anything, I don’t -”

“Hush,” Nigel tells him, not at all ungently. To the contrary, he’s calmed his tone and stifled his fucking rage at _them_ and himself in equal parts, and with no pressing threat, he focuses on Adam. Only Adam. Sweet Adam who laughed across his shoulder, darling Adam who thinks he isn’t the tiniest wee fucking thing in the world. Brave Adam.

“I’m going to stay,” Nigel says, as Adam’s breathing continues to steady. “I’ll fucking stay here in the spare room and then they won’t dare fucking come back.”

“You only went to the corner -”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ll have to leave to go get cigarettes.”

“I’m fucking sorry,” Nigel says again, because he can’t argue with Adam’s fucking logic. He can’t shut himself in, they’ll both fucking starve. His frustration turns against such base fucking needs as _food_ and _cigarettes_ and _sleep_ all of which are now fucking barriers to stopping this from happening again.

He leans in, close and sudden and so near that he can smell the lightning-tang of fear still sparking sharp through Adam’s nerves, and he kisses him. Lips closing together, pressing, he takes a deep, slow breath, and nods gently when Adam does the same. Again. And again.

“You did fucking good, little prince,” Nigel tells him, their brows pressed together, hands in the other’s hair. “I told you that you’re fucking brave.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _This is what they dreamed of, isn’t it? All the knights in all the stories. They put their ladies on pedestals and called them untouchable but had their lieges dropped their dresses and bade them close, none among them would fucking hesitate. Tristan died for a single fuck, Gawain nearly lost his head for a kiss. They’d each and every one shed their armor and their vows in an instant for what Nigel has now, and his moan pours thick against Adam’s throat as he kisses lower._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Adam wakes before seven. He might not wake at all because he can’t remember falling asleep. His bedroom is dark, still, curtains drawn, but even beyond that, the city is lit only by the headlights of passing cabs and streetlights. If he turns, he can see the crack of light from the partially open door, and beyond, Nigel, awake and vigilant, like a guard dog on duty.

It had taken Adam a long time to calm down the night before, holding onto Nigel until Adam had grown incredibly sleepy and had fussed as Nigel offered to carry him to his room. He had walked. He had skipped his shower.

Maybe that’s why he didn’t sleep well.

Now, though, he squirms, unable to get comfortable beneath the blanket, wanting to know that Nigel is okay, that the house is okay, that he himself is okay. He knows, logically, that he is, but at the same time…

He slips from bed and staggers from lack of balance, feet uncoordinated on the floor for a few steps until he reaches the door and pushes it open, squinting against the light.

“Nigel?”

The man hums, long and low, gun on the table before him and no magazine, no book open beside. Too strung-out to fucking read, too bitter still at his own fuck-up to focus on anything but a rather acute self-loathing. He pushes to stand, sleeplessness weighing down his body, eyes hooded.

“Morning,” he murmurs. “I’ll start your toast.”

Adam watches Nigel shove a hand back through his hair, silvering strands lank between his fingers. He follows at a distance as Nigel goes to the kitchen, banging cabinets and drawers not in annoyance but in exhaustion.

“No one came again,” Nigel tells him, just as Adam draws a breath to ask. “Not a fucking sound all night except for your snoring, and even that was fucking quiet.”

Adam doesn’t argue. He just watches Nigel, tense and tired and angry, and moves to stand a little closer, tilting his head to rest against his shoulder.

“You’re really tired,” Adam tells him softly, smiles when Nigel snorts at the obvious. Adam nuzzles a little against him, another comfort seeking gesture like he had the night before, holding Nigel close and feeling immediately so much safer for it.

“I don’t want toast,” Adam whispers after a moment. “It’s too early for breakfast. I don’t - I just -”

Adam frowns and looks at the ground before folding his hand over Nigel’s and walking back to the main room again. He settles on the couch and pulls Nigel to sit with him, leaning to rest against him when he does.

“You need to eat,” Nigel protests, only mildly. “You hardly ate fucking anything last night.”

“I don’t want food right now.”

“Still have to fucking -”

“Nigel, please.”

Nigel shuts up. He’s hardly got the strength in him to do anything fucking else, but watches with vague curiosity as Adam turns his head against Nigel’s shoulder, rubbing his nose there, his cheek. He’s like a little cat, insistent and demanding, wanting attention when he fucking wants it and showing no interest at all when he does not.

It’s cute.

Adam is fucking cute.

“What do you need, little prince?” Nigel asks, sighing.

“Just stay here,” Adam tells him quietly. “Please? You can hear anything you need from here, and I can stay close and not interrupt you working.”

The words are sighed, soft, and Adam continues to press against him, turning to rest his chin on Nigel’s shoulder. His eyes are barely open, expression one of utter concentration as he makes himself comfortable and hums a low, warm note against Nigel’s neck when he presses his nose against it.

“You’re angry at yourself and you shouldn’t be,” Adam mumbles. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Nigel shakes his head, throat clicking on a harsh swallow, throat burned raw from torching through an entire pack of cigarettes the night before. He adjusts to settle his arm over Adam’s shoulder, accepting the wriggle nearer against his side, and when Adam relaxes again, Nigel sets his hand to Adam’s hair. Fingernails against his scalp, he feels a splash of goosebumps shiver Adam closer still.

“I appreciate it,” he finally murmurs. “I don’t fucking agree, but I appreciate it.”

“You couldn’t have known, people are inherently unpredictable and it’s even less likely that you could have guessed their movements since they were conspiring -”

“Adam,” breathes Nigel, patient, somehow fucking ever fucking patient. “You pay me to fucking know. Just let me fucking feel bad.”

“I don’t want you to feel bad. I don’t feel badly about you,” Adam says, and as Nigel starts to pull away, Adam grasps him by his shirt to hold him there.

“It’s too late for this shit. Early.” Nigel opens his eyes again. Gently grasping Adam’s hair, he bends him back just enough to squint at him, the sleepy flush in his cheeks and his mouth all too precariously close. “Why are you up so fucking early? It’s barely past six.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Adam admits. “Or I didn’t sleep. I’m not sure. I can’t remember.”

“You were snoring,”

“So I slept a little, but I can’t sleep now.”

“Why not?”

Adam considers this for a moment. There are a lot of reasons. His entire state of being is unbalanced because of the night before, he’s out of his routine, he’s hungry, though he won’t admit it, he’s thirsty but he can wait. He’s aching for comfort he hasn’t sought for far too long. Just the closeness of another human being ready and willing and wanting to hold him.

“I’m cold,” he says instead, choosing the least problematic from the list.

Nigel squints a little more, but his eyes draw up in the corners and he allows himself to smile. He wouldn’t for anyone else, they’d either see his brief pleasure or they wouldn’t and he wouldn’t fucking care one way or the other. But Adam needs clarification, of words and intentions and expressions too.

Spoiled little prince.

“There are blankets in the spare bedroom,” Nigel suggests. “You should’ve fucking said something, I’d have gotten them for you.”

He tries to stand again just to see what happens, no real interest in going anywhere at the moment, and the press of Adam’s palm against his stomach brings the muscles beneath his hand tighter.

“If you go, then I’ll be colder,” Adam tells him.

“But you’re already cold.”

“Yes.”

What Adam wants is clear as fucking day, even if the degree of his wanting is obscured. Nigel feigns thought, creasing his brow, before he lowers his arm around Adam’s waist and gives him a tug. The little prince makes a little sound as Nigel pulls him into his lap, and wraps his arms around his waist.

“How about now?” Nigel asks.

Adam smiles, snuggling closer and resting his hand against Nigel’s chest. He curls up as small as he can to press to him. In truth, the cold was hardly bothering him, he could simply feel it and knew it was there. But held like this he's warmer, and he doesn’t want to move at all.

“This is nice,” Adam tells him, sighing contentment. He doesn’t say that he wants to do nothing all day but rest like this, he doesn’t say that he would enjoy nothing more than just spending time, dozing with Nigel as he sleeps. Pretending that there is no threat, there is no worry, there is nothing at all beyond this apartment and the comfort in it.

But Adam was never good at playing pretend.

“Are you cold?” he asks.

Nigel’s lips tug upward and he shakes his head. Grunting softly as Adam adjusts, spreading his legs across Nigel’s lap rather than sitting sidelong, he accommodates with hands against Adam’s back and follows the pathway of his spine, fingertips tripping over each little notch. Adam’s skin is cool as he traces the curves of the tattoo emblazoned on Nigel’s neck.

“A long time ago,” Nigel tells him, eyes closing even as his heart speeds. “In a place where there weren’t any pretty girls to look at, so I got myself one that wouldn’t fucking leave.”

“Where were you that there weren’t any women?” Adam asks, nose wrinkling in gentle delight at the absurdity of such a thing.

It lessens as Nigel snorts, “Fucking prison, Adam. Christ.”

Adam makes a little sound and leaves the pin-up girl behind. He follows the veins that run along Nigel’s arm, over contoured muscle twitching strong beneath his touch. Nigel brings his hand from Adam’s back to his chest, watching. Adam takes it in his own and curls his fingers, revealing on their sides faded grey lettering, ornate once but now blurred and pale.

“And these? It looks like German.”

Brow creasing, Nigel turns their hands palm to palm, and slots their fingers loosely together. Nigel is not cold now, if he ever was to begin with. His body feels flush, blood burning hotter than it should, friction beneath his skin from his racing pulse.

“Wagner,” Nigel murmurs, gently stretching each finger as he recites from memory the lines that have grown so faded. “‘Descend, oh night of love, grant oblivion that I may live’.”

Adam looks at him, then, really looks at him, eyes clear and bright and too damn wide, and when his smile spreads over his lips it is all Nigel can do to keep breathing.

“I didn’t know you like poetry.”

“It’s not exactly poetry.”

“It’s poetic,” Adam shrugs. “And you say you’re not smart, or clever. You are, much more than me, especially here. You know how to comfort and how to talk, what to say and what to do and you do it right. I can’t do it right. I can’t do anything right with people.”

“You think I can?” Nigel snorts. “You only can’t because people don’t make any fucking sense. They make sense to me and I still fuck it up, when they’re worth the time to even fucking bother. I’m not,” he considers, pausing, “nice.”

Adam spreads Nigel’s fingers again to look across the curling cursive script. “I think you’re nice.”

Nigel finds himself smiling again, as Adam’s smaller hand fits against his own, slender fingers stretching long against his. It’s a sweet thing to say, and Adam’s a sweet kid. A little prince, spoiled but good-hearted.

And Nigel the knight who’s meant to guard him.

He adjusts a bit, settling beneath Adam’s weight, and their palms slip apart. Instead, Adam slips his arms around Nigel’s neck and presses close enough against him that only by force of will does Nigel stop the elevator-drop of blood from his head to far less fucking appropriate areas. It does little good when Adam squirms until Nigel wraps his arms around again.

His lips part with a click, breath pooling warm across Adam’s ear and scruff rubbing stiff against his cheek. He tries to turn his eyes to watch him but he doesn’t want to pull away, not when Adam’s forgiveness has finally settled his mind and his honesty, his heart. Gently nuzzling Adam’s temple, lips brushing against his skin, Nigel asks, “Do you remember what you asked me? Over pizza. I never answered. I would, Adam. I do. Fuck, I fucking shouldn’t but I do.”

Adam swallows softly and turns to nuzzle Nigel in turn, just a little, eyes closed and hands curled against Nigel’s chest where he can feel his heart beating faster. He can feel Nigel grow harder, too, where Adam sits against him, and it feels strangely good. Unusual but entirely welcome. He sighs slow against Nigel’s neck and licks his lips open.

“Why do you think you shouldn’t?” he asks Nigel softly.

The twist of Adam’s breath against his throat coaxes a helpless sound from Nigel, strangled in his throat and swallowed hard again. He runs his hand up into Adam’s hair and softly fists curled strands between his fingers, as if to pull Adam away and keep him close, all at once.

“Fucking unprofessional, isn’t it,” he mutters. “Shagging the fucking boss. Thinking about it. Getting fucking distracted when I’m not even -”

Adam’s lips part and scarcely move against Nigel’s skin, his cock stiffening with a rough twitch.

“I’m not fucking queer,” he mutters, turning his head enough to nuzzle into Adam’s hair, mouth against his cheek. “And this isn’t what you’re paying for.”

“I don’t think I’m queer either,” Adam reminds him. “But does everyone have to be defined by a label for what they like? What if you’re my exception, or I’m your exception, and we are not queer at all but we like each other, and we want each other, what does that make us then?”

Nigel doesn’t answer, just grunts quietly, and Adam turns to press a warm kiss to his stubbled cheek.

“I don’t want to pay for company or… more than that. And I won’t. But if you like me, and if you find me sexually arousing and you want to sleep with me then… why can’t we do that? After seven I don’t pay you anyway,” Adam laughs quietly. He chews his lip and then settles back to look at Nigel properly. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t unless you want to. Don’t because I want to. I can’t think for you, I don’t know how your mind works, you’re not a computer.”

Nigel’s sigh is harsh, almost wounded, as he feels himself fray thread by fucking thread with each word Adam says. His thoughts are a fucking tempest, his body exhausted, too worn the fuck out to protest much of anything, let alone something he fucking wants. And he does. He wants. He wants to hear the sounds Adam makes when he comes and he wants to see him laid out skinny and bare on the bed and he wants those blue eyes focused on him when it happens.

“I want to,” Nigel whispers, swallowing hard as he nods. “I want you, Adam, I fucking want you.”

He uncoils against Adam’s mouth, twisting into a savage kiss as he pulls Adam’s hair taut and feels little hands fist hard in his shirt. He kisses Adam like he’s not kissed anyone since the kitchen that night, their tongues tangled in the shared tastes of toothpaste and cigarettes, sugary soda and bitter coffee. Pushing up against Adam when Adam spreads his legs further apart, he savors with a groan the grinding of his cock against Adam’s soft sleep pants and the rough friction of his own, pulled tight across his dick.

“It isn’t seven yet,” Nigel whispers with a laugh.

“No,” Adam agrees, somewhat breathless. “No, not for another seventeen minutes, and -” He kisses Nigel anyway, hands warm against his cheeks, slipping carefully into ash-blond hair. “But if we calculate all the times that… that you’ve made up time… and you were early… then that would -”

“Adam.”

“- would count as -”

“Adam, shut up.”

“M’kay,” Adam laughs, and presses his lips to Nigel’s again, eyes closed and cheeks pink with it as he parts his lips and gently seeks with his tongue for Nigel’s. He releases Adam’s hair and slides his hands to frame his face instead, spreading his thumbs across smooth skin, creamy white but for where his blush blossoms pale pink.

Nigel turns a little, a clumsy adjustment that brings his arm to wrap around Adam’s back as he’s turned to lay back on the couch, and Nigel follows him down. Propping himself up on his elbow he lays heavy and rumbles low into their kiss when Adam squirms and settles, a heel hooked over Nigel’s calf. A twist of his body and toes dug into the couch brings their groins together and Nigel’s voice unfurls with it, groaning.

This is what they dreamed of, isn’t it? All the knights in all the stories. They put their ladies on pedestals and called them untouchable but had their lieges dropped their dresses and bade them close, none among them would fucking hesitate. Tristan died for a single fuck, Gawain nearly lost his head for a kiss. They’d each and every one shed their armor and their vows in an instant for what Nigel has now, and his moan pours thick against Adam’s throat as he kisses lower.

“Fucking beautiful, Adam,” he purrs, dragging their bodies together again as his lips curl against Adam’s throat. “Little prince.”

Adam shivers. The name, the little title that Nigel has chosen to use as endearment and chastisement both, it fits so well and makes him so happy. It sounds warm purred against him, it feels good. And with Nigel pressing down against him at the same time, it sends Adam’s mind into a wonderful dizzying tailspin.

“You’re not cold anymore,” Adam says, lips parting on a quick little breath when Nigel rocks down against him again. “It feels… feels very nice.”

It does. It really fucking does. And equally, it feels fucking wrong. Every time Nigel grasps him, he expects a softer body with rounded curves, and finds flat planes and hard angles instead. Every time he rubs against him, seeking familiar wet warmth, there’s stiffness instead, pushing back against his stomach. It feels fucking wrong.

And that makes Nigel even harder.

He traps Adam’s mouth beneath his own again, the little prince’s sweet words falling to a moan instead that vibrates between their kiss. When he arches, Nigel presses against his stomach, palm spanning beneath his shirt, its hem caught on his wrist. He strokes across Adam’s hairless chest, grabs against the ridges of his ribs, teases up higher to the soft fluff beneath his arm and Nigel would never in his fucking life admit to making the sound that he does then.

It’s like he’s in fucking grade school all over, feeling up a girl for the first time. Just as new, just as intoxicating, and it makes him feel just as fucking helpless. Nigel is enthralled, entirely, and when Adam runs his hands beneath Nigel’s shirt in return, it’s a fucking wonder that Nigel doesn’t come in his pants like a fucking schoolboy.

“You can touch,” he tells Adam, turning his head aside with a hard kiss against his jaw. “Please fucking touch, darling.”

Adam doesn’t say anything, he knows his own words will fall flat. He doesn’t know how to turn them as Nigel does, how to coil them in that delicious purring way, how to make something entirely simple sound beautifully and lyrically sexual. So he just touches instead. He spreads his fingers against the warm hair on Nigel’s chest, unusual but entirely welcome, entirely right to him that it’s there.

Fingers curl and gently tug until Nigel curses and Adam grins, looking up at him as he does it again. Simple things. Little things. Touch after touch after touch, learning what makes Nigel happy, what pulls that particular low groan from him. Adam spreads and curls his hands, finds a nipple and rubs against it, blushing dark at the sounds Nigel makes.

He wants to be touched like that too. He can feel how sensitive he is beneath his shirt already, with nothing at all but pressing close to Nigel.

“So can you,” he encourages. Nigel blinks, looking between his eyes, gaze darting to Adam’s mouth when his teeth flash white against his bottom lip. All the little gestures that Nigel’s tried not to notice, all the expressions he’s seen anyway, movements innocent and guileless that fucking plague him at night, now his to watch with abandon.

“Please?” Adam asks, and Nigel sinks against his mouth and body with a moan.

He shoves Adam’s nightshirt up his chest, breaking the kiss enough to pull it off over his head. Milky skin, satin soft, with little tawny nipples pebbled stiff. Only a bare dusting of hair surrounds each, otherwise entirely smooth beneath Nigel’s palm as he runs it up the center of Adam’s chest, and down one side again. The brush of his fingertips over Adam’s nipple nearly pulls the younger man from the couch, a sweet whimper alighting on his sigh.

Nigel’s never given a fuck about what anyone thinks is right or wrong anyway.

He grasps Adam’s waist and kneels between his legs, stubble leaving a wake of goosebumps rippling through Adam as he kisses slowly down his chest. Spreading his tongue flat, he drags it against Adam’s nipple, then the other, dark eyes uplifted towards parted lips, kiss-swollen and scarlet.

Adam squirms, eyes closed and hands up to press to them as he blushes deeper, trembles with every touch against him. He is so sensitive, everything feels too much, all at once. Overwhelming and somehow loud, though neither of them are speaking.

Another long draw of Nigel’s velvet-rough tongue and Adam whimpers, biting his lip and pressing his hands harder against his face to cover it more. He mumbles something that Nigel can’t quite understand, and jerks back from another lick, cock tenting his sleep pants as Adam spreads his legs wider.

It’s the kind of worship in which Nigel fucking revels, and with far too fucking few in his bed who deserve the effort. But every breath across his chest, every brush of lips or tongue or teeth earns a reaction, a whimper, a sigh, a tremor that runs the length of Adam’s body until he pushes his curled toes into the couch and arches. Each reflex makes Nigel’s cock twitch, each response makes his foolish heart gallop louder in his ears. He wants to give Adam more.

He wants to give him fucking everything if he’ll keep making those pretty little sounds.

Nigel reaches up to grasp Adam’s wrist and draw his hand from over his mouth. He presses it to his own instead, sighing hot against his palm, and whispers, “Tell me again.”

Adam’s blush spills down his throat, prickling ruddy across his chest as he shakes his head.

“Tell me what you want, Adam,” Nigel murmurs, grinning crooked. “Please.”

A helpless sound whines from Adam’s throat as he shifts, heels pushing him upward until he can rest his head against the arm of the couch. He doesn’t meet Nigel’s eyes - he never really does - but Nigel watches him anyway, and swallows back a groan when Adam says only:

“Lower.”

Nigel dips his eyes to the tent in Adam’s soft flannel pants, and watches as it shifts beneath his gaze. There’s a wet spot on it, darker than the rest, and Nigel bends himself lower, dragging a long kiss against Adam’s stomach. He holds his wrist, still, even as Adam lifts the other to his eyes again.

“You want me to suck your cock,” Nigel asks. Confirms. Fucking hopes, and isn’t that a fucking thing. So maybe it is fucking queer. Maybe it is wrong. Maybe Nigel’s bent as a fucking butcher’s hook and he’s just never known it before. But he doesn’t want to fuck men. For that matter, he doesn’t want to fuck women right now either.

He wants Adam.

Only fucking Adam.

And he wants to fucking hear that Adam wants him too.

“Tell me,” Nigel whispers, eyes narrowing as he watches the length of Adam’s body. “Tell me what you want, little prince.”

Again, Adam shakes his head, too embarrassed to even consider asking for something like this, with the wrong words, with the wrong tone, with the wrong everything. He knows that as soon as he does, Nigel is going to snort, call him something unseemly and climb off him and leave. Take a shower, go to bed, go to the Bronx, anything.

He doesn’t want him to go.

But the way Nigel asks, soft and coaxing and delighted by the responses his body is giving, makes Adam almost want to try.

Almost.

“Can you kiss me lower?” he asks.

Nigel’s eyes narrow a little more, and he hums as he lowers his head to press his lips against Adam’s belly button. Adam squirms, cock jutting against the underneath of Nigel’s chin.

“And now?” he asks, and Adam huffs.

“Lower. Please.”

Nigel bows his head and obeys, brushing a kiss just beneath his belly button. Fine hairs tickle his lips as he does, and again Adam rocks upward, needy and whining. Maybe he means to do it and maybe he doesn’t, but the prodding pulls a low, pleased sound from Nigel just with the fucking insistence of it. This isn’t something waiting for him, this is something that seeks him, that wants to fuck and thrust and Nigel’s so hard for it that he’s fucking dizzy.

“Lower?” Nigel grins.

Adam just nods, chin jerking up and down as his throat works and he parts his lips. He can’t say it. He can’t even think it without his cheeks burning red from the words. They sound so good when Nigel says them. They won’t when Adam does.

“Yeah,” he breathes, whining when again all Nigel does is nuzzle, draw the tip of his nose over the waistband of Adam’s pants. He wants. He _wants_ and he is impatient for it when usually he is so good at waiting. Adam swallows, makes another soft sound and closes his eyes tight.

“I want…” It’s just a few words, a few words he can parrot back, it can’t fail so miserably… “I want you to suck my cock… please…”

They’re fighting words. Ugly words. Words that end in broken teeth and blood and busted knuckles every other time anyone’s ever spoken them to Nigel. But they’ve always been intended for that, an insult rather than a request, begging a fight that Nigel’s happy to provide. Dumb fuckers, all of them, who deserved the beatings Nigel has given them. Not a one has ever said it like Adam does. Not a one even registers as more in Nigel’s mind than a gasping smear against the sidewalk. None of them compare in a thousand fucking years to Adam.

To the way his fingers curl over his eyes.

To the way his lips part on a vocal little sigh.

To the way his blush floods his entire body and he shivers as Nigel lifts his pants to free his cock, sitting flushed and full and heavy against his stomach.

Nigel’s never been so close to someone else’s cock before. Maybe taking a piss but he’s hardly looking when that happens, and no one else had better be looking, either. He draws a breath to speak but the scent of Adam’s arousal fills him instead. A heady, musky mix of sweat and sex that even from so tiny, so slight a fucking thing as his little prince, Nigel is dizzied by it, intoxicated by the fucking power inherent.

“Please,” Adam whispers, and Nigel’s heart could fucking break for the beauty of it.

He lowers his head, tucking the waistband of Adam’s pants beneath his balls, and he presses a kiss to his shaft. It rises and lowers again, a thread of clear slick joining the tip of Adam’s cock to his belly, and Nigel sighs a low laugh. Kissing dicks is bullshit. Waste of fucking time. And surely, _surely_ Nigel’s gotten enough fucking blowjobs in his life to manage something better than that.

So instead, drawing and holding his breath, he drags his tongue up the length of Adam’s cock.

Adam keens. No other word for it, he keens and he squirms more and he presses a hand over his mouth to keep quiet and slips his other down to stroke Nigel’s hair. It’s so innocent, and so gentle, and so entirely undemanding. Adam’s voice pulls desperately high and Nigel takes the tip of his cock in his mouth, just to see. 

The taste is musky, slightly salty, very different to having his tongue between the warm slippery lips of a girl’s pussy. But not as bad as he had occasionally imagined it to be. Far from it, in fact, when Adam moans his name and twists his hand a little to bite his knuckles instead, trying to keep quiet that way.

It feels incredible. It feels so, so good that Adam can barely breathe. So he just makes little sounds instead.

“More… please.”

Adam laughs, his entire body trembling with it, toes curling into the couch. He had not thought this would happen. Cuddling, kissing, touching, yes, but this? Never this.

He sees supernovas when Nigel dips his head and takes him deep.

Damp lips curved around his shaft, and Nigel listens as Adam’s long, high moan wavers through the air and vibrate into the fucking pit of his belly. He presses low, tongue rolled to slip his cock back further, stroking Adam off with his mouth, cheeks hollowed to suck. Adam’s thighs are shaking, his hips raise. He bucks and the head of his dick hits the back of Nigel’s throat enough to make him gag.

The sound that Adam makes is the most beautiful fucking thing Nigel’s heard since the first time he heard fucking Wagner.

Nigel grasps Adam’s hips with both hands. He doesn’t push him to the couch but it’s enough that he can ready for the pushy little thrusts past his lips. His chin is slick with spit, a purr rattling from deep in his chest. He sucks up to the head and pushes his tongue against Adam’s dripping slit, nearly catching beneath the head with his teeth when Adam juts upward suddenly at the sensation.

All due credit to all the women who have put up with Nigel fucking their mouths with abandon. It is far more fucking complicated than it looks.

But it hardly seems to matter when he doesn’t turn a certain way or take Adam as deep as he would like. Above him, Adam is shaking and writhing, sweat shining in a thin glistening sheen against his stomach, over his chest, cooling in the hollow of his collarbone.

And every breath, every single fucking breath is a moan of pleasure, both of Adam’s hands in Nigel’s hair, now, abandoning the futile attempts to keep himself quiet.

Good.

He sounds fucking gorgeous like this.

“Nigel -”

And that, right fucking there, the way a moan lilts Adam’s words, hitches his breath and has him tensing in pleasure, squeezing the warm strands of Nigel’s hair. Nigel can taste his fucking pulse, thumping swift against his tongue. He can feel the warmth of his balls drawing up, see the way his stomach ratchets tighter with each breath, each suck, each squeeze of Nigel’s lips around him.

He releases his cock with a little _pop_ and spreads himself over Adam’s body. Sweat slicks his chest hair against Adam’s skin, their stomachs push together. Nigel kisses Adam, a rough twist of lips that spins his senses so hard his own fucking hand is shaking when he shoves it between them. He takes both their cocks in his grip, squeezing them together and stroking them off as one, quick wet sounds where his spit smears between their skin.

Adam wraps his arms around Nigel’s shoulders and holds on, little else he can do but that, when the pleasure pulses and hums beneath his skin. Higher and higher and higher until, with a whimper, Adam grips tighter to Nigel’s form and comes, hot between them.

It feels wonderful, overwhelming in sound and smell and sensation entirely. He feels emptied and alive, exhausted and so, so good. Touching himself never brings about a response this powerful, there is something remarkable about being touched by another person, feeling a different hand stroke and press and hold. Adam says Nigel’s name again, breathy and warm, and turns against him as Nigel follows him over with a groan into release. He ducks his head and tilts it into Adam’s kiss, mouthing against his hair. Between them his dick jerks and sprays, hot bursts of white that splatter across Adam’s pale belly and mingle with his own. Never in a thousand fucking years would Nigel have imagined himself in this position. Never in a fucking millennium would he have thought he’d come so hard from it that he has to gasp like a drowning man to catch his breath.

His little prince pulls at him, stretching his hair long in his graceful grasp to bend him back. Adam doesn’t meet his eyes but they glance across each other in passing, each taking in the swollen lips and flushed cheeks, the smears of spit and sweat shining slick. Nigel leans in to kiss Adam with a groan, a low rumbling that is met with a sweet, high whimper.

Maybe he’s queer, maybe he’s not.

Maybe he’s an employee working for money, maybe he’s working off the clock.

Maybe Adam has become a home for Nigel, who has been too long without one and reeling unmoored from the lack of grounding that would stabilize the snort of powder and burn of liquor and fill condoms tossed to motel room bins.

Whatever the fuck this is, whomever Adam is to him, Nigel knows only that as Adam’s arms curl around him and keep him close, he wants to be nowhere else in the world than here.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A video file, only, nothing likely to backdoor his system, especially considering the protocols he’s already got in place. It’s the message, though, a few words in the body with no subject line, that find his cursor hovering:
> 
> _Watch this with Nigel_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

For two weeks, Nigel sleeps at Adam’s. He stays awake for an hour, two, sometimes longer, to wrap his arms around Adam and nuzzle him when he wakes up. Adam leans back against him, he touches him when he can, he stays up late as Nigel stays up early, to take that time together.

At the end of the second week, Adam unplugs one of his screens and moves it to the spare room to lie with Nigel as he works, the man out cold, exhausted, but holding onto Adam possessively regardless.

Adam smiles. Nigel snores a little too.

It isn’t the best posture for working. It isn’t all ergonomic to hunch towards the screen set on the bed’s nightstand, keyboard in his lap. But Nigel’s arm around his waist alleviates any discomfort. Nigel’s breath against the small of his back warms Adam entirely.

Nigel snuffles in his sleep and presses closer, the scarred bridge of his nose pressed to Adam’s skin. On his network, Adam passes through countless keystrokes of passwords, all nonsensical and of double-digit complexity to anyone who isn’t him. He blinks, and leans a little closer to the screen.

There is new mail, and it’s not from one of his info-trading contacts.

He doesn’t know this name.

And he doesn’t know how they’d have found him.

There’s an attachment, though, and at this Adam snorts. He’s ready to start tracing the address despite a burner domain when Nigel’s lips part on a sigh against his hip. Adam bites his lip and grins, recalling the night before - and before that and before that one too - as Nigel smeared shining spit across his mouth. He recalls the way he grunted as he swallowed. His stomach tightens pleasurably at the memories, and he opens the email.

A video file, only, nothing likely to backdoor his system, especially considering the protocols he’s already got in place. It’s the message, though, a few words in the body with no subject line, that find his cursor hovering:

_Watch this with Nigel_

Adam swallows and considers for a moment the man behind him, soundly asleep. It is only midday, he has not been sleeping long and Adam knows how tired he gets. He doesn’t want to wake him for something that could easily be - and most likely is - a hoax and a scare tactic.

For a moment more, Adam considers deleting the email entirely.

But he’s curious. If there is blackmail on Nigel that could come to haunt him, Adam will take the time and make the effort to get rid of it, as much as one can online. If it’s insignificant, he can delete it. In truth, he can think of no reason to not watch it. Should it be pertinent to Nigel, he will wake him.

Adam sighs and opens the file.

It is footage from a security camera, a little blurred and blued. It shows a restaurant, round tables, men and women seated together over a spread of food, and Nigel, entering from the left side of the screen. Adam frowns, there is no sound, but the tension is clear in Nigel. He is coiled like a predator, angry as a cat about to pounce, yet he hides it with such grace, he moves like a dancer.

Adam brings a hand to his mouth and gently chews the side of his thumb.

The diners pay no notice to him beyond a glance or two, until Nigel’s posture makes his shout clear. There is no sound, but their bodies snap rigid, hands against the table. A woman presses a hand against her mouth, shuddering, until she startles at another unheard command and drops her hand to the tablecloth, clutching it in her fist.

Nigel stands with his back to the camera and reaches beneath the back of his shirt. Adam watches dark steel glint before there’s a flash of light. Another. Another. One after the other after the other all in a circle as Nigel presses his gun to the back of their heads. Blood spreads across the tablecloth, black in the greyscale film, and as the crying woman shoves herself from her chair to run, Nigel catches her by the hair.

Adam looks away and he doesn’t look back and he won’t look back and he can’t look back and he can’t breathe.

And suddenly the arm around his middle is too tight and he feels sick and with a whine he squirms free and lands with a soft whump to the floor. Nigel shifts in sleep, seeking for Adam as Adam crawls back out of reach and watches him with wide eyes.

“Did you do that?” Adam asks, watches as Nigel blinks himself blearily awake. “Did you do that, Nigel? You killed all those people. All those people, just sitting there, why did you do that? Why did you?”

It’s a bad fucking dream. Nigel rubs his eyes to clear it away and stretches only to find fading warmth on the bed beside him. His fingers curl into the comforter and he looks past the edge of the bed to where Adam sits trembling. Squinting, Nigel slowly turns his gaze to the bright light bearing down on him from the screen.

A table full of food soaked in blood, and a half-dozen bodies lying motionless against it.

It’s a bad dream.

It’s a bad fucking dream.

“Baby,” Nigel whispers, and Adam’s voice cuts him through.

“No. No, I’m not your baby,” Adam growls. “I’m not your son, your kid, I’m not -”

“Sweetheart, stop -”

“Tell me!”

Nigel pushes up to sit, adrenaline flooding bitter cold beneath his skin. He starts to stand but Adam’s hand uplifted is enough to stop him, and with a short sigh, Nigel lifts his hands in surrender.

“It was just a job,” he murmurs.

It wasn’t. It was a massacre.

“It was a long time ago.”

When he was young and stupid and needed work to survive.

“I haven’t since.”

Not like that, but it’s a lie and Nigel shakes his head, lips curling against his teeth.

“Not like that, Adam, I didn’t have a choice.”

Adam shakes his head, turning helplessly to the back of the screen, to Nigel again.

“You just shot them,” he whispers. “Just like that. They were unarmed, Nigel, they were having dinner. You killed them.”

“Darling -”

“Stop. Don’t call me that. Don’t.” Adam takes a deep breath and curls up on himself again, arms around his knees, elbows pressing tightly in, and hands up to run through his hair, not yet covering his ears, but already slowly rocking.

“Don’t tell me you had no choice,” Adam adds after a moment. “Don’t tell me that. I know how the economy works, I understand how the class system has messed up most innocent hard-working people in this city and every other. But there are always choices, Nigel, always options. You could have found a place to stay, you would have done something safer, you could have -” Adam whines and tugs his own hair harshly, knuckles white.

“Stop.”

It is Nigel’s voice now that forms the knife to sever them. Nigel’s teeth bared in hurt and dismay and anger, fucking anger, curling thick as smoke in his lungs. “You don’t fucking know,” Nigel hisses. “Here in your expensive fucking flat, behind your computer screen. You’ve never known fucking hunger. You’ve never known real fucking fear, Adam, don’t tell me that there are fucking _choices_ -”

“Get out,” Adam says, shaking his head. “Get out, now!”

“I had to send a message -”

“Now, Nigel!”

“You think I’m fucking proud of this?” he spits, lunging from the bed so suddenly that Adam recoils. Nigel curls his hands at his sides, keeping distance, keeping fucking space between them even as he wants nothing more than to smash the fucking computer that insinuated this between them, memories he’d managed to suppress, nightmares that had finally begun to wane.

“I had no choice,” Nigel tells him, snaring his pants from the floor and holding them in his fist as he steps closer. “There was no fucking choice. Either we sent a message or they’d have fucking shot me just as dead as them.”

Adam curls his hands in his hair tighter and trembles with the pressure his muscles are under. He hurts. Everything hurts. He can still feel the warmth of Nigel’s heavy arm around him and he wants that to go away. He wants this to go away. He wants to curl up under the blankets with Nigel and pretend this never happened. 

But it did. It did, once, and that matters. That matters a lot.

“But they didn’t shoot you,” Adam says. “They didn’t shoot you, you’re here, and you did that and you’re here and they sent this to me. Why did they send this to me? What more do you owe them?” Adam blinks then, lifting his face, lips parted and brows furrowed in deep displeasure, and something like helplessness. “Nigel, who do you owe?”

Nigel’s lip lifts in a snarl as he watches the boy on the floor, cowering from him when only hours before he crawled against his body and laid heavy. He watches the mouth that kissed his own twist in unhappy accusation. He watches pale cheeks flood red with blood not in pleasure but in pain.

The pain that Nigel fucking causes, that he’s fucking cursed to cause, in everyone who can stand him longer than a night or two.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nigel breathes.

“It matters when it comes to my door,” Adam says. “It matters when it comes through my door and when it sends things to a server no one is supposed to find, that’s when it matters, Nigel, and it did.”

Adam scrabbles to stand, leaning against the wall for balance. He isn’t scared of Nigel, he’s just disgusted that something like that could happen, that someone who is so caring and kind beneath the put-on act of macho power could do something so cruel for a paycheck.

“How much do you owe?”

“It doesn’t -”

“How much, Nigel?”

“I’m not a fucking charity case, Adam. I’m not a fucking pet you adopt at the fucking pound, I can take care of it.”

“You’re not,” Adam points out. “You haven’t.”

“You want me to fucking go? It comes with me. How does that fucking sound?”

Nigel feels the words like a fist in his chest, twisting his stupid heart free of its moorings. It doesn’t matter and he should have fucking known better. He isn’t meant for this, for friendship, for love, for partners like Adam. He’s meant for what’s seen on the screen, looping again and again as he snares a helpless woman back by her hair and holds her to the table, his gaze turned away.

“Fucking stay,” Nigel says, stepping into his pants before seeking for his shirt. “Fucking find someone else, but don’t delude yourself for a fucking second into thinking anyone else you hire hasn’t done ugly shit they’re not proud of.”

“I’m telling you I can help,” Adam snarls back. “I’m telling you that I can cover it so they leave you and me alone.”

“I don’t want your fucking money.”

“You’ve been happy to take it for the last six months and eighteen days, Nigel, you can earn it back if I front it.” He still feels sick, he still wants to scrub away any residual touch against him and forget that video exists, but he knows he can’t. Eidetic memory is hardly forgiving, he won’t forget this. He won’t understand it, but he can come to terms with it, he can listen, he can understand what to do to not have it happen again.

“And then I owe you,” Nigel tells him, voice softer as his anger collapses to the roiling dark fear beneath. “And that’s how it fucking goes, Adam, around and around, borrowing money from one to pay the other, until that fucking happens,” he says, pointing towards the screen. “Until you’ve got no fucking choice but to do whatever’s asked of you.”

Adam’s eyes widen and he parts his lips but Nigel passes by him without pause, grabbing up his things as he goes. A shirt sweetly unbuttoned by slender fingers and tossed aside. A shoe kicked free when Adam slid needy atop him. Packs of cigarettes and a bag and every little bit of home that Nigel had found here on parcels of floor and dresser.

Nigel plucks a cigarette free and stuffs it between his lips, as he jams his feet into his boots.

“I’m going,” he says, around the filter.

Away from the debt strangling his breath like a noose.

Away from the video that shows again and again merciless executions.

Away from Adam who’s got no part in this and all the ugly memories and all the little hopes that sprung like wildflowers between cracked pavement.

He hears Adam follow him to the door, but he doesn’t look at him, working on the locks and resolutely not lighting his cigarette inside no matter how badly he aches to.

“If you keep running it will keep happening,” Adam tells him, and when Nigel looks back, he’s standing pigeon-toed with his hands before him, one palm rubbing against the opposite elbow. “It will be a cycle of owing and debt and running again.”

“Then what the fuck do you suggest I fucking do, Adam?” Nigel asks him, pulling open the door and tugging the cigarette from his lips with the other hand. He regards the little prince where he stands before snorting and taking his leave, closing the door behind himself with a slam loud enough to drown out Adam’s answer.

“ _Stay and fix this_.”

\---

Adam doesn’t sleep that night, he can’t. There is no reassuring breathing in the other room, no warmth of Nigel nearby making his coffee and sliding the balcony door open and closed quietly as he decimates his pack of cigarettes. There is no Nigel, period, and Adam finds that it upsets him enough to make him sick.

He doesn’t sleep the next night, either, hands trembling over the keys by then, hungry, because he can’t bring himself to order anything and face the delivery guy coming to the door.

He doesn’t sleep the third day either, pacing the apartment and finishing the last of the whiskey in his fridge that Nigel had left behind. He had tracked him through the spending, watched as Nigel vacated his room in the Bronx and moved on. Still in New York but elsewhere. He doesn’t bother to call him, he knows Nigel would have dumped his burner. He doesn’t send an email, he knows it won’t be read.

Sometimes, he goes out onto the balcony and looks, finds the street quiet and empty and no one there at all. He’d hoped that Nigel would maybe come back, not to apologize but to fix it. He’d hoped Nigel had heard him.

But he’s never there and so Adam stops looking. On the fourth day he falls asleep because his body can’t take it anymore, and he doesn’t see the man smoking beneath the busted streetlight toss his cigarette aside in relief at seeing the lights in the house finally switch off.

Nigel’s cheeks have burned to golden brown. Every night and most of each day, he has sat at distance - the cafe on the corner, a stoop far on the other side of the street - and watched the residents of the brownstone come and go. When the day is quiet, his nerves as settled as they can be, he goes to one of the hotels nearby to shower and sleep for a few hours. When he snaps awake again, the scent of gunpowder singeing his nostrils, he returns.

Over and over again the footage plays behind his eyes. It is the clearest image he has ever had of that night. At the time he remembers snorting so many rails that he couldn’t feel his face, pupils blown and veins humming, muscles so tight that there was no kickback from the handgun at all. A blur of bright lights and buzzing sound and blood damp against his arm.

It was two days later that he washed it away, picking off the encrusted brown with his head against the tile wall of a shower, scarcely able to stand.

Of course he couldn’t hide here. Of course they could find him. If Adam could, then so might anyone else. Debts like his - fucking imaginary bullshit numbers racked up without reason and with a bump of powder to ease his stress - don’t go forgotten.

He was twenty-five. No. Twenty-four. His mother died the year before on a night when he was out busting heads in Bucharest to make money for other people. The drugs that were offered to him in friendship came at a cost. The debts that accrued from junkies catching him in a nod and absconding with his shit were not forgiven. It was a means to an end - send a warning to a competing agency by knocking their restaurant-cum-safehouse out of business, and all would be forgiven.

Nigel hadn’t planned on needing little packets of peace to get him through the night.

Nigel hadn’t planned on finding worth in his inherent brutality.

Only when a drop to the police fell through and his acquaintances found themselves in holding did Nigel make a break. Budapest first, then to Berlin. Munich to Paris to Amsterdam to America, New York City. Years of watching shadows pass him in the light of his cigarette. Years of seeking out old habits and new enemies. Years until his hair began to silver and his hands began to hurt and he finally began to sleep a whole night through.

And then Adam, whose message overlapped with a murmur of Romanian caught in passing.

The job was too easy not to take and the pay good enough that had decades’ old debts found him again, he could make headway on them and buy himself time. He can’t undo knowing their faces, but the money - maybe the money would be enough.

Nigel was fucking wrong to hope it could ever be so simple, but as he lights another cigarette, he figures that if they take him out here, at least that’ll be the fucking end of it.

But they don’t.

Not that night or the next morning or the next night.

He watches Adam’s apartment windows, sees him pass back and forth behind the drawn curtains in the dark, watches the way they shift in morning when he wakes up. He knows that apartment inside out, he knows where everything is, what the structure of each room is, its damn dimensions, since he had measured, once.

He knows the little thing that lives in it, all alone.

Nigel finds that when his dreams are not filled with burning and blood and the reek of death, he dreams of Adam. He dreams how he smiles when he’s sleeping, curled up in a ball like a little cat. He dreams of Adam’s voice, his eyes narrowing in delight, his hands and how careful they were in exploring, until they learned that sometimes leaving marks was perfect, and sometimes twisting free was fun.

Nigel watches Adam move around his apartment as dusk falls, watches as one by one the lights come on in the house, where Adam turns them on and leaves them. He lights another cigarette but when he looks up, the light in the kitchen is off again. Then the one in the living room sparks as though a fuse has short circuited.

His breath stops, until the smoke held in his lungs jerks free in a rough, choking cough. He grips the cigarette and watches. Maybe it’s just a power outage, even though the other apartments’ lights are on. Maybe it’s just a blown fuse from too many fucking computers. He knows where the box is, the hallway just beside the front door, a matter of steps and then a few moments to snap the circuits back into place.

Nigel counts.

And when nothing happens, he drops his cigarette and goes. Heels hitting hard against the ground, headlights flash against him and he ducks the oncoming car to cross the street, watching as it pulls up in front of the brownstone.

Facing the wrong way, on a one-way street.

“No,” Nigel whispers. “No.”

The wind catches his hair as he runs, towards two big bodies with a smaller one between them. He calls Adam’s name loud enough to falter before pushing against the ground again. The door slams shut and Nigel’s fingers snare the trunk of the car as it skids away and he runs behind it and into people on the main street and into fucking traffic with a squeal of horns and a screech of tires and he watches the car vanish, breath burning and heart lodged in his throat.

“No,” he pleads, he begs to no one amidst the shriek of horns around him in the intersection. The roar of sound muffles his own sharp shout and he presses his fingers against his eyes so hard he sees light, caught in laughing blue eyes that narrowed only for him.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Something. Something that tugs at him and so he dials, setting the phone to his ear and waiting._
> 
> _It rings, five, six, seven times, and just as Nigel pulls the phone from his ear, a familiar voice picks up._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

The apartment is silent when Nigel returns to it. The lights left intact remain on. The only mess is the glass on the floor from those bulbs shot out with a silenced gun, and a tipped over cup in the kitchen. Nigel makes his way through the rooms as he did every day for six months, checking what he usually checks, touching nothing.

In the bedroom, he finds Adam’s gun on the floor. The bedside table drawer is so far open it’s nearly fallen out of its slot from the power with which Adam had tried to get it open.

No gunpowder residue. Nothing but a ghost of what happened here.

Nigel doesn’t like the smell of it, it’s rotten and cloying, thick and too warm. It doesn’t taste like it should taste. It tastes poisoned.

He slicks his tongue across his gums and tries to shake the tingle snapping sparks beneath his skin, more bitter than cocaine but just as much a savage pulse beneath his skin. Nigel walks the apartment from end to end a half-dozen times before he finally stops, dropping to the couch to stare at the computer desk before him. His eyes narrow.

Rhia’s got more than a little to do with this. She told Nigel to stay clear. She knew the nature of their arrangement, if not its spirit. She knew enough about Nigel to somehow fucking find that video and get it to Adam.

Or someone else did.

Nigel curses beneath his breath and spreads his hands along his face. He tries not to think of Adam’s disgust and fear towards him and he struggles not to imagine Adam somewhere fucking alone, rocking himself in terror. The only breath that fills Nigel’s lungs to any extent is the one that comes as he recalls the last time they shared this couch together, in a tangle of limbs and dangling clothing.

_”You smell really nice,” Adam laughs, nuzzling against Nigel’s chest, still a little damp from his shower. He really is like a cat, pliant and warm and bendy. An element all on his own. “And I like this,” he adds, plucking lightly at the hair there. “I like this a lot.”_

Nigel shakes his head and pushes himself to stand.

The computer and its screens are undamaged, the screensaver floats the facsimile of the aurora across all of them until Nigel pushes a key, and then it flickers to a login screen he can’t imagine even wanting to hack into. Besides, what good would it do if he tried? He doesn’t know what Adam works on, he deliberately doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he could possibly fucking do to fix anything on his end.

And he needs to fix it, he has to.

He picks up Adam’s burner, left beside his computer, and turns it on. There’s no password on it because there doesn’t have to be. Nigel’s burner was the only contact saved, under the name _security_ , but he squints at the recently dialed numbers. One a day, some only every other day. He calls one at random, blinking as a voice greets him from one of the hotels where Nigel had struggled for sleep.

“Wrong number,” Nigel murmurs, hanging the phone up again.

_”You like my chest hair,” Nigel grins. “It’s fucking furry.”_

_“I know, but it’s soft. I don’t have any.”_

_“You have a few,” teases Nigel, running a hand up Adam’s shirt, hem caught on his wrist. His fingers graze a nipple, circling it as it stiffens. “Two. Maybe three.”_

_“Several more than that,” Adam says, “but not like yours.”_

_Nigel draws a breath as Adam bends across his lap, skinny legs spreading wide, only a t-shirt and little blue briefs clinging to his slender frame. Sighing long, Nigel lifts his hand to Adam’s hair when he noses against his chest, sweeping a kiss over his head._

_“Why?” Nigel asks, tugging Adam’s hair to see his face a little before letting him nuzzle again. “Why do you like it?”_

_“It’s very masculine. It’s thick and warm and smells like you,” Adam says, sitting up tall again and sliding their groins together._

Another number dials to the bank.

A third to the old Bronx apartment Nigel had rented. 

One to his old burner, just in case.

He tries not to think of how hard it was not to call Adam, not to come by and knock on the door and apologize, or just kiss him because what the fuck can he say? He’s sorry? He is sorry. Sorry never saved a life. Sorry never paid the fucking bills. What good is that word beyond its apparently vestigial meaning?

Nigel gives up going through the dialed numbers and turns to those received. Some are the same, returned calls answering a query. Some are unknown. And one is familiar. Nigel wracks his brain, tries to piece the numbers together. He’d gotten a call from it, or perhaps he’d seen it written down and then threw the paper away.

Something. Something that tugs at him and so he dials, setting the phone to his ear and waiting.

It rings, five, six, seven times, and just as Nigel pulls the phone from his ear, a familiar voice picks up.

“Rhia.”

_”Haven’t seen her since the last time, darling.”_

_“That’s very vague.”_

_“Since - I don’t fucking know, Adam, a week ago? Two weeks? I’ve lost fucking track of time,” Nigel murmurs, sucking soft kisses against Adam’s throat as he pushes his hips against Nigel’s stomach. “I don’t know how you know what fucking year it is, locked inside your little castle.”_

_“It says on my computer,” grins Adam, and at this, Nigel leans back to regard him with genuine surprise._

_“Did you just - ”_

_“I’m capable of making jokes, Nigel.”_

_He takes the scolding in stride and buries his laugh against Adam’s shoulder, before he closes his teeth against the broad ridge of his collarbone. Both shirtless now, Adam rocks forward to trap his cock between them. Nigel grasps him beneath the arms, hands wrapped over his shoulders._

_“I know you are,” Nigel says. “I just didn’t expect -”_

“- to hear from you again.”

Nigel places his palm firmly to the wall, then curls it to a fist. He doesn’t punch, he doesn’t risk a broken hand or Adam’s wrath for putting a fucking hole in the plaster. Adam shouldn’t come home to a mess. Adam won’t come home to a mess.

But he will fucking come home, if it kills Nigel to make it happen.

“Where is he,” Nigel asks, in as even a tone as he can muster.

“Downtown.”

“Downtown fucking _where_ , half the fucking island is downtown.”

“Somewhere private. Somewhere secure. Somewhere that you can’t find him, no matter how much he calls for you. And he will call for you.”

“You cunt.”

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Rhia’s tone is as much amused as it is indifferent. “Look, Nigel, I don’t have a problem with you. I never did. But as you do your job, I do my job. And my job was to get that kid out of his damn fortress of an apartment and away from you.”

“Why?”

“He’s pissed off a lot of people. Took a lot of money for something he shouldn’t have done in the first place. Shit doesn’t come cheap in this town, Nigel, you know that. So he’s merely paying off a debt come due.”

“He isn’t in debt.”

“No, but you are.”

“And he’s got fucking nothing to do with it.”

“Two birds, one stone,” Rhia replies. “Why make my life any harder than it has to be when I can get paid twice for the same job?”

“Seems to me you’ve only got one,” Nigel says, tilting the phone away as he forces himself to swallow past the vice-grip in his throat. “What’s to stop me from going under again?”

“We found you before, Nigel.”

“Adam found me,” he tells her. “You didn’t find shit and you wouldn’t have if it weren’t for him.”

Rhia hums - no, she fucking purrs - in thought. “Good thing we’ve got the right tool for the job then. Like a tracking tag on a wild animal. We just have to convince him -”

“Fucking convince?”

“I’m being polite,” she grins.

_”You’re a piece of work, you know that?” he laughs. “Fucking heavy, too.” Nigel shoves his heels against the far arm of the couch and stretches long across it as Adam sets fluttering fingers to his stomach and leans down to kiss him._

_“You said I’m tiny,” Adam reminds him, and Nigel snorts but he doesn’t disagree. Adam explores slowly, still, as each night - day - whatever has brought them both new discoveries. Running his hands along Nigel’s ribs, Adam found a place that made Nigel tense, ticklish. Holding Adam atop him with hands against the backs of his knees, Nigel learned that Adam likes to be moved around by Nigel’s strength. They’ve learned that Adam is every bit as fucking bossy as he is in his daily life and they’ve learned that Nigel is just as eager in asking:_

_“Tell me what you want, little prince.”_

_Adam draws his fingers over Nigel’s skin, touches the scars and the marks of damage and wear his body has taken. He was fascinated by them from the moment he saw them first, not asking so much as studying, careful and gentle, pressing his lips to some of them, eyes closed and breathing slow._

_“I want to touch,” Adam says finally, tilting his head and pressing his lips together in a smile. “I want to touch and see how you respond when I do, because it feels so good when you touch me.”_

_“Then it will feel fucking fantastic when you touch me, darling.”_

_Adam’s smile splits wide and he presses a hand to his face, humming warm, before slipping his other hand down to circle Nigel’s cock through his pants. For a moment he just rubs, eyes on Nigel’s lips, on his cheeks, briefly to his eyes. He strokes and he tugs and then, both hands down to keep his balance, he slips Nigel’s pants to his thighs and takes him in hand properly._

Nigel sets the back of his hand to his brow, voice slinking low through clenched teeth.

“You’re going to be in fucking pieces by the time I’m done with you.”

“I like it when you talk dirty.”

“Where the fuck is he, Rhia?” Nigel snarls. “You don’t want him, not fucking really. You want me. Trade him out and let him go, and you’ve got a sure fucking thing. I won’t fight -”

“You just said that you’ll tear me to pieces,” she reminds him.

“Not if you let him go. He’s not done anything fucking wrong.”

“Besides embezzlement, fraud, blackmail, grand theft...”

“From fucking corporations who are insured for it,” he grits, bringing his hand slowly against the wall once more. “There are a lot of people, Rhia, a lot of fucking people who not only want my debt paid, but want me fucking dead. You’d have their favor and a fucking swimming pool’s worth of _leu_ if you put me in their hands.”

“And you’d just,” she sighs, “let this happen, hm? What the hell is this kid to you, Nigel?”

_”Beautiful,” Nigel rumbles. “My clever little prince.”_

_Color fans wide beneath Adam’s eyes, darkening his freckles, brightening his eyes. He ducks his head to watch between them, wrist curling as he squeezes up the length of Nigel’s shaft. Foreskin puckers in the tunnel of his hand and Nigel leaks clear and copious, groaning as it spills down Adam’s fingers. Another stroke sends a ripple through Nigel’s muscles, tightening and relaxing in turn as his hips press upward into Adam’s grasp._

_“Just like that,” whispers Nigel. “Play with it just like that. I won’t fucking come until you tell me to.”_

_Adam shivers, delighted, and bites his lip._

_“What if I want to keep touching for a long time?” he whispers, watches the way Nigel responds to the words, the way his lips part with a click when Adam draws down the foreskin to gently thumb against the tip of his cock. “What if I make you really, really want to come?”_

_Nigel curses, one hand pressing to his eyes, the other holding against Adam’s thigh and stroking the smooth pale skin there. This kid, this infuriating little prince, holds so much sway over Nigel that he could tell him, now, to do anything at all and Nigel wouldn’t even question it._

_“I want to come now.”_

_“No,” Adam laughs. “Don’t yet.”_

_“Not until you tell me.”_

_“Do you like it when I tell you what to do? You always ask that,” Adam whispers, leaning close enough to Nigel’s jaw, bent across his body, that his breath tickles Nigel’s scruff._

_He does like it. He really fucking does. Nigel has become accustomed, by his own fucking demand, to calling the shots in every other part of his life but this. But Adam’s sweetness, his care, and his bossiness have proved altogether too intoxicating, and in the weeks that have passed since these lines were crossed, Nigel has learned to trust him and to yield. It’s a fucking relief not to have to be the one doing the telling; it’s a fucking turn-on to let Adam tell him instead._

_“You didn’t answer,” frowns Adam, and Nigel has to clench his stomach muscles to stop from jizzing right in Adam’s hand._

_“Yes,” he grunts, when his breath returns to him. Sweat shines on his brow. “Yes, I fucking like it.”_

_“So if I touch you all night -”_

_“Fuck.”_

_“- and never tell you it’s okay to ejaculate -”_

_“Oh, _Christ_ , Adam.”_

_“- then you won’t?”_

_“I won’t,” Nigel says, choking down a breath as Adam curls his fist around the head of Nigel’s leaking cock, turning his wrist to screw downwards and back up again. “Not until you say -”_

“- that you’ll fucking let him go,” Nigel says. “Take me there yourself, I’ll fucking come. Blindfold me if you want to be fucking dramatic about it. No fight. No bullshit, Rhia. You’ve got my fucking word. And then you want to fucking hear how he takes his fucking toast in the morning? I’ll fucking tell you, but not another fucking word about him until then.”

"You know," Rhia tells him, tone entirely unchanged since they started talking. "It's actually kind of sweet to see you so worked up. I figured you liked the kid well enough, he paid you nicely to babysit him. But this is so much better."

"Rhia -"

"He hasn’t even asked for you," she says. "Not once. Just curled up in his little corner and wailed since we brought him in. He is a strong little bastard though. A few of my boys will have some nice bruises to repay him with once the time comes."

Nigel’s lips bend across bared teeth, and he brings his fist down hard enough against the wall to leave a dent, shoving himself away from it and towards the door.

“If you fucking touch him -”

“I won’t. I don’t want to fuck up my nails.”

“If _anyone_ fucking touches him, you’ll pay for every fucking bruise with broken fucking bones, Rhia, you and everyone else. You’ve got no fucking idea what you’re doing to him but I’ll make it abundantly fucking clear for you. Fucking crystal.”

Her laugh bubbles bright as Nigel takes the stairs two at a time to the sidewalk.

“You’re sexy when you’re possessive.”

_“I don’t think I am,” Adam says, tilting his head. With a puff of breath, he lifts his hair from his face._

_“You fucking are. Look at you.”_

_Adam’s smile stretches wide and his eyes hood. He arches to his knees, straddling Nigel’s thighs, and takes his cock in both hands, fisting his dick fast enough that Nigel feels himself start to shake from it. He buries a groan into his palm and arches, hips lifted from the couch, relinquishing himself to Adam’s pleasure._

_Adam touches, he watches, he presses his lips to Nigel’s pulse to feel it skitter, and sweetly, so sweetly, he tells Nigel he can come if he wants to. It is permission and encouragement, allowance and sweet fascination. Adam is so curious, so beautiful in his curiosity. He can see the way Nigel shifts and moans, the way his body trembles and responds, and finally yields to pleasure._

_Adam kisses him, gently, against his jaw, and brings a hand up to suck his fingers clean, watching Nigel watch that in turn, smiling when he curses._

_“Do you have any fucking idea -”_

_Adam shakes his head, smiling more, sucking another finger clean as he listens, as he waits to be told what he is to Nigel today._

_“Baby, do you have any fucking idea -”_

“- how well I know this fucking city?” Nigel hisses. “If you don’t tell me, or take me, I will find you anyway. I will find him. And hell, Rhia, fucking hell upon fucking anyone who does anything to Adam before I find him.”

“You’re growing tedious,” Rhia sighs. “You said you’d come quietly? I don’t believe it for a fucking second but say, for your pitiful sake, that I do. How? You’ll just waltz right into the car I call for you? Claiming you’re unarmed?”

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” growls Nigel. “What the fuck am I going to do, little girl? Huh? Waste the driver and cause a fucking scene? Waste you and not get to where we’re going? Pat me down if you fucking like, you had busy hands before.”

“And you, very particular interests,” she laughs, unphased. “Now and then a guy wants one finger up his you-know-what, but two, Nigel...”

“Shut the fuck up and come fucking get me.”

“You’re at the apartment.”

“Out in front. I’ll even tell you who to sell me to so long as you let him fucking go. You’ve probably fucking scared him away from computers for the rest of his life, anyway. Fucking bitch,” he snorts, though the thought curls thick as oil in his belly, and just as black. “I’ve got a revolver in the back of my pants. You can take it yourself.”

“I will,” she promises. “Be there in ten. Try not to be angry -”

“Fuck you.”

“It’s just a job, Nigel.”

The words make Nigel sick, echoing in his mind in his own voice, with Adam staring in horror as the video looped on the screen beside them. It was just a job. _It was just a job_.

He hears the dial tone before he lets his arm drop to his side and his head drop back. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s never been in a situation like this before, he has never had collateral that someone could hold against him, he has never had someone that could be in danger for his stupid shit.

And Adam. Of all fucking people, they took _Adam_.

_”Little prince,” Nigel purrs, smiling when Adam nuzzles against him, sleepy and beautiful, cheeks pink with the warmth between them. It’s morning, now. It’s early. “Darling, it’s almost seven.”_

_A fussy sound and another nuzzle, and Adam curls closer against him, unwilling to move. Nigel just watches him, strokes his hair and down his back, back up again with rough knuckles and calloused fingers until Adam shivers pleasantly and blinks his eyes open._

_“We could sleep in,” he mumbles. “Or, you could sleep. I can just work next to you while you do.”_

_“You’d move?”_

_“You can’t sleep on the floor.”_

_“I would -”_

_“No,” Adam laughs. “No. You’ll go to bed, and I’ll find a way to work next to you.”_

_“Why?” Nigel laughs, and Adam just hums against him._

_“Because I feel good with you near.”_


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Nigel is going to kill a lot of fucking people for this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

She takes Nigel’s gun from him, and keeps it in her hand.

He crushes Adam’s burner beneath his heel and leaves its parts spread plasticine and shining across the sidewalk.

Hands uplifted, Nigel slides into the car first, and they start to move before Rhia’s even closed her door. She keeps his gun trained on him, but she’s got her own as well in a holster beneath her jacket.

“Not going to blindfold me?”

“You’re not coming back,” she grins. “Doesn’t really matter then, does it?”

“Are you always such a bitch?”

“It’s a defining quality,” Rhia muses, settling with her back against the door and a leg drawn up onto the seat. Nigel looks from her easy smile to the weapon in her hand. He shifts to sit more comfortably, a movement she watches with keen interest until he stops and relaxes again. He keeps his hands unmoving against his thighs.

Nigel smells their destination before he sees it. Centuries of fish and fires and sweat and ships, soaked into the streets themselves and staining the air thick as a fucking greasefire. The fish market had moved out years before to make way for developers, but he’s not fucking surprised to see so many of the old warehouses still intact, ancient brick foundations and peeling corrugated steel yet to give way to modernity.

“Thought they were tearing this place down,” he says. “Fucking shame.”

“You’re mourning the fish market? You are a sentimentalist.”

“No,” Nigel snorts. “Mourning the fact I’ve got to spend my last hours in the stinking asshole of a city that smells bad enough without it, which is still a better fucking fate than having to spend it with you.”

“Don’t be bitter, baby, we had fun,” Rhia tells him, tilting her head to rest it against her shoulder. “Didn’t we? For a few evenings I couldn’t even get you out of my bed, you were so determined to stay in it. And man..” She bites her lip, draws it between her teeth before letting it go with a sigh. “To give credit where it’s due, Nigel, you’re a fucking great lover.”

Nigel snorts, turns his head to look out the other window, watching the looming skeletons of rusting metal and rot-soft wood that were once foundations of an enormous place filled with voices and people and life. Fitting, then, that once you take that life from it it would start to die itself. Some things are hard to explain, some things shouldn’t be, but to Nigel the place feels lost, exhausted. Once they tear it down, he’s fairly sure the angst that hangs over that part of the city will ease like a long-held breath.

Maybe he is fucking sentimental.

“So how is this going to work then?” he asks, rolling his shoulders and settling again. “An exchange?”

“Oh, he’s not going anywhere,” Rhia says, lifting an eyebrow when Nigel glares at her. “Nigel, he has his own debts. He’s waiting for them to be collected. All he has to do is tell us a few codes and he can go. But he isn’t speaking at the moment, silly boy. Just rocking himself. You'd think someone with so much power would at least have a pair of balls.”

Nigel wants to eat glass. He wants to fold fire into his fists. He wants to breathe smoke and draw blood and knock the smug fucking look off Rhia’s face and he wants Adam.

He wants to hold him, tightly, enough to ease away his fear. He wants to quiet his senses with strong arms, and steady his breath with whispers. The thought wounds him, and like an injured animal, Nigel tenses. Adam is afraid, overwhelmed, and alone.

Nigel is going to kill a lot of fucking people for this.

“He’s got a fucking pair,” Nigel tells her, adjusting in his seat as the car slows to a stop at a still-standing warehouse’s back entrance. “He’s also got fucking autism, you miserable cunt.”

“Does he really?” Rhia’s expression grows, for a moment, almost catlike in its pleasure. “How interesting. I suppose beating the crap out of him won’t get us very far, then, will it?”

Nigel just swallows, not rising to the bait.

“And beating the crap out of you in front of him won’t do anything either, he’s not empathetic, he can’t relate to anything human. Explains why he’s such a genius on his computer, why he’s happy staying in the gray area of morality - he doesn’t have that either.”

Rhia shifts, not yet getting out of the car, as the driver does, and rests a hand against her knee, watching Nigel more closely.

“You’re not stupid enough to think he ever really gave a fuck about you, right?”

Nigel’s jaw flickers tense, a hard edge digging cracks from the corners of his eyes. It’s bullshit. It’s fucking bullshit whether she knows it is or not. Adam’s not a fucking computer, though Nigel’s certainly wondered at times. All that fell away upon breathy little sounds and sweetness, earnestly spoken; upon galloping pulse and flushed cheeks.

Nigel’s perception.

Physical reaction.

It’s entirely possible to fuck without feeling - Nigel knows that to a fucking fault. It’s entirely possible to seek comfort without affection. His fingers curl to a fist and spread against his knee again.

“You are,” she breathes, a laugh clapped beneath her hand. “You really are that hard up for it, aren’t you? How fucking sad.”

Nigel turns on her but finds his arm held by the burly fucker from the front seat. He drags Nigel from the car spitting curses in Romanian, as Rhia’s laugh rings loud between the empty buildings.

“You romantic,” she sighs, unfurling from her side of the car and setting her arms a top, gun leveled at Nigel. She tilts the barrel towards the door to the warehouse office. “Bring him inside and let’s see how well this love connection holds up when we sell them for scrap.”

Within, the smell gets worse - a stale, lingering stench of once-fresh fish, the smell of bad breath and too many people. Nigel frowns, following as he’s led. His steps echo, and he forces his mind to relax, enough to at least count the other footsteps around them. Two people, maybe three, not including Nigel and the guy from the car. Not including Rhia. So six, then, at worst, since someone has to be keeping an eye on Adam.

A small operation. 

Easy enough to break if he can manage a moment of distraction.

Anger boils hot enough to steam his breath, so Nigel breathes through his nose, ducks his head. He can’t sense Adam so much as feel the familiar spring warmth that comes with him so near. He always smelled like flowers - not like that store-bought body wash shit, but fresh, living, wild things. Nigel sucks in a deep breath and holds it.

He’s taken upstairs, and each counted step doubles the speed of his heart. He imagines he can hear a little fussy sound from behind the door. Maybe he does hear it. Maybe Adam is close enough that when Nigel presses his tongue past his lips he can catch the heat of Adam’s skin against it.

The door doesn’t yield, clattering loud when he’s shoved against it by a fat hand at the center of his back. Nigel swings his leg behind him and nearly sweeps the big fucker holding his arms back, until a too-quiet _click_ stills everything in Nigel but his pulse.

“You promised you’d be a good boy,” Rhia reminds him, as a ziptie cuts sharp into Nigel’s wrists.

“If only you’d been this fucking adventurous in bed, sweetheart,” Nigel spits, blood trickling hot from the split across the bridge of his nose. “Maybe I’d not have gotten fucking bored with you.”

The door’s unlocked and Nigel’s shoved to the ground of the security office overlooking the barren warehouse. Dust eddies thick from the tile and Nigel blinks bleary eyes to squint through it.

He makes out a pair of sneakers, heels up, jiggling skinny legs.

“Your majesty,” Nigel murmurs, with a rueful laugh before a swift boot to the stomach quiets him.

“Don’t do that,” Adam says, voice rough and eyes puffy from tears, when Nigel looks up enough to see them. He’s not restrained, but he hardly has to be, tight and nervous as he is. Nigel wonders if he managed to climb into the chair on his own or if he was dumped into it and hasn’t moved since.

“He’s a bit of a useless guard dog, Adam,” Rhia points out, tilting her head to look down at Nigel on the ground.

“He’s not a dog.”

“Bodyguard then,” she replies, tone just the same. “Think about it. Bad history, lies, debt, a terrible habit for promiscuity. And he left you vulnerable. Not qualities that make a shining example of a human being.”

“You have a larger list against you than he does,” Adam points out, eyes on Nigel now that he has something to concentrate on. He himself looks unharmed beyond a bruise on his cheek, one nostril rimmed with dry blood. Nothing broken, nothing done to the lovely little prince. He offers Nigel a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and falters quickly, but it’s there.

“I own up to my bad blood,” shrugs Rhia, circling Nigel on the floor and setting a booted foot to his ribs. “I don’t lie to my employers. I don’t mislead them.”

Adam makes a sound as Rhia shoves Nigel to his stomach and grabs him by the ziptie purpling his hands.

“I also don’t fuck them,” she whispers, before a laugh breaks the quiet and she drops Nigel back to the floor.

Nigel snorts, lip curling, and gives very real fucking thought to letting enough blood drip into his mouth that he can spit it at her. But Adam is watching, eyes on Nigel only, not on the big bastard and not on Rhia. A quick jerk of her head has the fat fucker from before hefting Nigel into the chair beside Adam. Another zip tie joins him to the chair itself, and when he tenses on instinct, a few more are added for good measure.

Nigel restrains himself from spitting. That’s low-class shit.

“You’re going to make new friends tonight,” she tells Adam, and the movement of Nigel’s revolver towards him brings Nigel’s foot beneath him again. She quickly turns the gun on him instead, shaking her head once in warning. “And you’re going to get to see some old ones.”

The muscle leans to her with a murmur against her ear, and her smile blooms wide, eyes drawing up in delight. He turns to go, as a clattering from below gives way to the rumble of a car pulling onto the warehouse floor.

“Speak of the Devil. Well,” she laughs, “Devils. No hard feelings I hope,” Rhia adds, as she slips the gun to the back of her pants. “They’re gonna pay me what they owe me, and you’ll never see me again.”

She sets her foot between Nigel’s legs, steel-toe pressed just hard enough to make his breath shorten. Leaning across her lithe leg, knee bent into Nigel’s sternum, she brings her hand to his throat to hold him in place. She brushes her grin against his mouth, sweeping a kiss to bloody lips.

“Good luck out there, handsome.”

Adam watches, one foot curled behind the other as his knees continue to bounce. He can hear people outside, voices echoing in this smelly warehouse, he knows that until the burly man returns, it is just him and Nigel and Rhia, and that isn’t so bad. Rhia’s quite little.

Adam lets his eyes slip to the door, back to Rhia and blinks seeing the gun planted within easy reach beneath the waistband of her jeans. He could. Logically he should. Panic grasps him as surely as it had when he had been pulled from his apartment, gagged and bagged and struggling against who only knows what.

Panic twists his guts at the thought of what will happen when these men get their hands on Nigel.

He sets his feet flat to the ground first, it wouldn’t do to trip, and as Rhia leans in a little more to kiss Nigel again, Adam takes the gun and steps back, eyes wide, hands unsure on this strange weapon. It’s heavy. It’s foreign. It’s not his own and he has no idea how it works but he points it anyway, and with a soft clearing of his throat, makes his way towards the door to fumble with it and let it quietly close, securing them inside.

“Excuse me,” Adam says. “Don’t do that. I asked you not to before, and you didn’t listen. That was rude. He doesn’t like it.”

Rhia uncoils from over Nigel with her hands uplifted. Holding his gaze, her amusement immense, she spares Nigel a wry look before shoving her foot against the seat of the chair and spilling him to his back. A curse in Romanian and a groan as his weight lands on his arms, and Adam steps forward.

“Stop. Let us go.”

She sighs, turning to face him, eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Look, kid -”

“I’m not your kid,” Adam tells her, brow creased. He tightens his grip on Nigel’s revolver to stop his hand from shaking. “I’m not your boy, I’m not your sweetheart or - or any of the other things you’ve said.”

“Whatever you are,” she says, “you’re making a fucking mistake. How well did this go for you in the apartment, huh? You think it’ll be better here, with them downstairs?”

“Adam,” Nigel breathes, his voice sharp as sandpaper. “There’s a knife in my pants - don’t fucking take the gun off her, baby, don’t turn away from her -”

“In your pants?” Adam turns his eyes to Nigel with furrowed brows. “Why is it in your pants, Nigel?”

There is a silence, stark and ringing, and when Rhia tries to take advantage of it to move closer to the door, Adam cocks the gun without even turning back to her again, hands steadier now. Nigel huffs a breath of exasperation.

“Because they would have found it if I had had it anywhere fucking else, Adam.”

“Oh,” Adam blinks, the words filtering, the concept and context making sense, before he nods. “Okay. How?”

“What?”

“How do I get it, if I can’t take the gun off her and look away from her. I only have two hands. And if I move from the door she will go to the door.”

Nigel lets his head rest against the ground, pain throbbing behind his eyes. No, not just pain. Exasperation.

He sighs.

“Step towards me, without lowering the fucking gun and without looking away from her. If she fucking moves for the door, you fucking shoot,” Nigel tells him. “Squeeze, don’t pull. Remember?”

“I remember, but -”

“No fucking buts, Adam, not right fucking now.”

Leaning towards the window, Rhia glances to the warehouse floor below, and looks back to Adam with an expression that’s almost bored.

“Fucking kneel down - eyes up and gun fucking up - and take it out of the fucking front of my fucking pants Adam I swear to fucking Christ you could reprogram the fucking moon and this is fucking complicated -”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Nigel opens his eyes, staring at the ceiling.

“How could anyone program -”

Nigel’s snapped curse, snarled Romanian, is enough to spur Adam into movement. 

He goes, careful to keep his feet planted comfortably and himself balanced, keeping Rhia in his view and the gun pointed towards her. He knows, from studying, reading, watching, that people bolt when they panic. He swallows and turns the gun just a little to the left of where she is, enough that should she make a movement too sudden, Adam will land the shot where it needs to go.

Not that he’s ever tried.

He’s never fired his gun, let alone this one.

He hopes he looks like he knows what he’s doing.

Carefully, he sets one foot behind himself and sinks to his knee, hand seeking blindly against Nigel until he feels his belt, and slips his fingers beneath the tongue to work it free. Rhia watches with a raised eyebrow, and Adam’s eyes narrow. Beneath his hand, Nigel makes a low groaning sound when Adam strokes him, practiced and well, trying to find the knife.

“Lower.”

 

Adam swallows, cheeks pink, and keeps his gun on Rhia as she curls her lips together and takes half a step closer.

“Don’t.”

“Not going anywhere,” she says, pushing up on her toes. “Why would I? This is better than pay-per-view.”

“You’re a bitch,” Nigel rumbles.

“Looks like I’m not the only one.”

Adam grasps again and Nigel shoves his teeth into his bottom lip hard enough to hurt. Of all the fucking places, of all the fucking times. With certain fucking death just outside the door, death that Nigel’s managed to duck for a fucking decade, he’s got a guy’s hand down his fucking pants and a bounty hunter watching. His arms are going fucking numb, and there’s blood in his mouth.

And he’s getting hard.

He’s getting fucking hard from it.

“What the fuck, Adam,” Nigel snarls, as Rhia laughs bright and claps her hands together. She lifts them quickly again, grinning, and Adam finds the slug of metal in the pit of Nigel’s underpants. He turns his wrist to jerk it free, knocking Nigel in the balls in the process and pulling a far less pleasant sound from him in the process.

Swinging his legs, Nigel manages to turn the chair to its side with a clatter, baring his wrists for Adam.

“Fucking Christ, Adam, I swear to fucking Christ -”

Adam just hums a note of displeasure and ducks his head to see how he can work the knife open, warm in his hand from how close it had been against Nigel’s skin. He hears the shuffle of feet, the drawn breath, and squeezes the trigger.

The shot is far too loud in the small space and all of them flinch. Rhia stands with her back to the door now, hands up and eyes wide.

“What the fuck!”

“I told you not to move, please, this is hard enough without you making it more difficult.”

“I didn’t think you could fucking aim!”

“Next time, I will,” Adam replies, dryly, finally figuring out how the little switchblade works and setting it carefully to the tie digging into Nigel’s wrists. He is careful not to break skin, but quick in his work, and once Nigel is free, he stands again, both hands on the gun, ears ringing and body shaking. He isn’t made for this. He doesn’t like this.

And he is actually really angry.

Nigel kicks up to his feet and snares Adam around the waist. Shoving a kiss against his temple, fingers flexing, he sets his hand over Adam’s fingers and loosens the gun from his unsteady grip. Nigel has no such fucking affliction, taller somehow, broader as he slips his finger to the trigger and lets go of Adam to step closer to Rhia.

It’s the first time that either have seen a flicker of fear crack her practiced restraint.

“You’re fucked,” Nigel whispers, his own voice muted beneath the dull thudding deafness in his ears from the shot. He sets a livid hand against her throat and holds her to the door, barrel against her temple. “Think, Rhia, beautiful girl, think for a second about how entirely fucking _fucked_ you are.”

“Please don’t -”

Nigel blinks, it’s Rhia’s lips that part but Adam’s voice that speaks. Adam stands to Nigel’s left, just behind his shoulder, hands in his pockets, one heel set atop the other foot, gently bouncing in lieu of his whole leg doing it.

“You don’t kill women,” Adam reminds him softly. Rhia’s eyes flick to him, back to Nigel, wide and hopeful and close almost immediately when Nigel just steps closer.

“There are always fucking exceptions to the rule.”

“Where will you go?” Rhia asks. “Huh? With both of your asses on the line for this? They’re not down there for me, they’re there for you. How do you think you’ll get past them?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Nigel snarls, bearing down on her, dark gaze searching her face as she closes her eyes and steels her jaw. “You’re the one that fucking found us.”

“I found him. He lead me to you. It was convenient.”

“Fucking convenient?”

“Yes,” she hisses, teeth gritting tight. “It was a job, Nigel. I’m already fucked when you go, don’t do this.”

“Why the fuck not, Rhia? One good fucking reason -”

It’s Adam’s hand against his that snaps Nigel back from the black pit of rage pooling thick at the edges of his vision. It’s Rhia’s lips parting in relief when the barrel of the gun is slid away from her. Nigel lets her go, and she slides to the floor before pushing up and staggering to the other side of the room.

Away from the door.

Away from them.

“I’d better not see your fucking face again,” Nigel says, and he’s surprised by the way the words shove against his ribs. For a few days, it was nice, good sex and good company. Their work syncopates, but their hearts -

He shakes his head, hand against the door as Adam steps to the console.

“Do you remember the way out?” Adam asks, and Nigel nods.

“Two sets of fourteen stairs each.”

Adam’s eyes narrow as he sets his hand to the board.

“Good.”

The room goes black. The warehouse beneath, pitched into darkness as shouts arise. Already on edge from the gunfire, there is a nervous clamor, car doors closing. The engine revs.

Nigel reaches into the darkness for Adam as Rhia moves, and with his arm around Adam’s waist, he slings the kid around to stop her exit. A breath sighed shaking against Adam’s hair and Nigel presses the gun to Adam’s hand. He grabs him by the waist, hurls Adam across his shoulder with an arm around his knees, and shoves open the door.

“I’d fucking duck, Rhia.”

“Are you fucking serious?” she whispers. And Adam just hums, making sure he is holding the gun properly as Nigel makes his way out.

“I can’t aim in the dark,” he reasons. He aims another shot, just one, to the ceiling of the dusty office, to be sure not to hit Rhia on their way out, but to cause enough of a panic that they would not be registered making their way down the stairs.

No one pays them mind, bodies bump into bodies, and Adam keeps his eyes closed and his hands tight on the gun and presses as close to Nigel as he can as he is carried from that smelly, stifling warehouse.

There is yelling, there are too many people, there is darkness, and Adam is hungry, he realizes with a frown, he’s really hungry.

He blinks his eyes open only when they’re outside again, when Nigel sticks to the wall to keep them mostly out of sight and Adam can actually aim, should he need to.

“We didn’t bring a car,” Adam reminds him after a while.

“Fuck a fucking car, Adam.”

He blinks at Nigel, watching him lean against the wall and swipe blood across his face with the back of his hand. It’s nearly black in the moonlight, Adam notes, before he huffs a little sigh.

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Adam.” He’s set down to his feet as Nigel leans his head against the wall.

“They’re going to drive out soon.”

“Adam.”

“And we don’t have any way to get -”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence, explaining how far it is from Fulton Street back to the West Village. He doesn’t even get to take a breath because Nigel’s mouth is closed against his own. He can’t aim this way, he can hardly hear if anyone’s coming.

But he feels Nigel shaking against him, and lifts his free hand to Nigel’s cheek, eyes opening as the trembling slows and stops.

Nigel swallows hard, snorting up blood spilled fresh from his nose bumping Adam’s cheek. When he sighs, it’s with a laugh.

“We’ll find a fucking cab.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Why?" Nigel’s brows furrow and he sets a hand to Adam’s thigh, another to cover the one touching him so softly. "Little prince, this is my fucking life, this is all it is - a fucking mess. Maybe you fix enough to hold them for a few years, but then what? You'll be stuck lugging my fucking weight around city to city... I've already fucked up enough for many fucking lifetimes. I am not doing that to you. Not you. Not again."_
> 
> _"I don't want you to go." Adam tells him, brows drawn and eyes wide. "Just don't go again."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the love in the world to our beloved beta-reader [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/). We couldn't do it without you, darling.

Adam fusses when they pass his block.

He fusses again when they drive across a bridge, the city’s lights shining like stars, into another borough.

He makes another fucking fussy sound when Nigel lumbers from the cab and palms the driver a fistful of money and drags Adam out behind him.

It’s a nice hotel, all things considered. Plush carpets and soft music and glass and chrome all over. A view of the river and Manhattan reflecting in it. It’s nicer than they could ever get in such a fucking state if not for the stolen but valid credit card - charged immediately and in full - that beeps through. Nigel tried to smear the blood off his face before coming in but it did little good.

When they’re asked if they have any bags to bring up with them, a dour look silences any further questions.

By the time they’re at the room, beeping through the door, Nigel can hardly fucking stand. He jerks his crumpled packet of cigarettes loose from his shirt pocket and bangs open the balcony door, before carrying his lit smoke through the room again to the minibar. Every tiny bottle is taken and swallowed, one after the next, before he paces back outside.

Adam watches him, having made his way to the bed and sunk down against the edge. He realizes he’s trembling, from his fingertips down to his feet, and uncaring for the well-made bed, he draws his knees up and wraps his arms around them, setting his chin atop.

He thinks of every moment from when the door had opened in his apartment, to when he lunged for his room and his gun, to when he was gagged with a bag over his head and dragged out of the home. He thinks of the car ride, of the reek of the warehouse, of being tossed into the office and bruising his shoulder when he’d landed. He thinks of how his knuckles hurt, meaning he hit someone in his blind panic. He thinks of how he had hoped with everything left in himself that Nigel would find him.

He casts his eyes to the balcony where Nigel leans over it, head between his arms that lay outstretched over the railing. His cigarette burns away unsmoked, and when it starts to crackle on the filter, Nigel flicks it away, automatically reaching for another.

Adam turns his cheek against his knee and rocks slowly on the bed, not in fear, but in contemplation.

They are together in this now, whether either of them want it or not. And he finds, surprisingly, that he wants it. He wants that brash and loud and wonderful man with him to whatever end. He can clear Nigel’s debt, wipe his movements online and keep him safe, just a little longer.

And then?

And then…

The balcony door slides open and Adam blinks at him, slipping his feet to the floor again and setting his hands behind himself for balance.

“Nigel, I -”

Nigel turns on a fucking dime at the sound of Adam’s voice, his name, the little breath that follows. He pins the cigarette between his lips and pulls hard enough to crease his brow, taking out half of it in one slug and flicking it away. Smoke billows behind him as he steps back towards the door and slips it shut against the cool night air.

“I shouldn’t have fucking gone,” Nigel says.

“To the balcony? You can’t smoke inside.”

“To the fucking balcony,” he agrees. “Out of the apartment. Out of the bed, away from you, Adam, I fucked up. I stayed on the street and I fucking watched for as long as I could keep my fucking eyes open but I fucked up.” A sigh falls flat from his lips, and grimacing, Nigel twists his head against the snared muscle in his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Nigel says, a bloody, smoky mess.

Adam frowns, watching him coil and try to unsnag the pain and annoyance that holds him. The guilt that seems to stifle him. He pushes himself to stand up and moves closer, setting a hand to Nigel’s cheek again, turning him, or trying to, making a displeased little noise when Nigel doesn’t go.

“Look at me, please,” he says, and Nigel does, then. “I told you to go. I yelled and I said cruel things and you said them back and I told you to go. This isn’t your fault, Nigel.”

“How the fuck is it not my fault?”

“You didn’t swindle corporations out of millions of dollars, proving to them their security systems are useless. I did that. I don’t actually know what you owe for.”

Nigel’s smile is bitter as fucking ash, so he hides it against Adam’s palm and kisses his soft skin, again and again, between almost every word.

“Drugs,” he admits, his tone flat. “Women. Guns. You borrow money from one asshole to pay back the scarier one. Then the one you borrowed from starts to threaten you. You work a job to pay that back. You get fucked up to finish the job. It costs. It all costs, and exponentially it fucking increases until you’re so deep in the shit that your choices are to fucking go to a restaurant of innocent fucking people and shoot them all or to get your brains spattered against a Bucharest alleyway. So you do it. And it gets bad, outside your fucking control, because you fucked up someone’s restaurant. But who knows who set it up? Who knows the fucking faces of everyone involved? You. And then you fucking run and you don’t stop fucking running.”

Adam only breathes again when Nigel stops talking, and Nigel’s shoulders curve beneath the weight of ugly honesty. He’s got no fucking right to kiss Adam’s hand. He’s got no right to set his own fingers over the top and press him closer.

No right to accept the kiss that presses to the corner of his mouth, or to allow the reassurance that eases his own heart back to beating.

“If I run again,” Nigel murmurs, “they’ll follow me. Not you.”

"You can't just keep running," Adam tells him gently. "It is a cycle and you're stuck in it. It's as much psychological as it is circumstantial." He hums and draws his thumb warmly under Nigel’s eye, again and again, soothing. "We can fix it."

"No."

"I can fix it," Adam amends, taking the two steps needed to get back to the bed and sit down. He pulls Nigel with him, but instead of straddling Adam’s lap, Nigel kneels in front of him. "I can fix it."

"Why?" Nigel’s brows furrow and he sets a hand to Adam’s thigh, another to cover the one touching him so softly. "Little prince, this is my fucking life, this is all it is - a fucking mess. Maybe you fix enough to hold them for a few years, but then what? You'll be stuck lugging my fucking weight around city to city... I've already fucked up enough for many fucking lifetimes. I am not doing that to you. Not you. Not again."

"I don't want you to go." Adam tells him, brows drawn and eyes wide. "Just don't go again."

Nigel makes no agreement. Closing his eyes, he nuzzles past Adam’s hand and instead turns his cheek against his little prince’s thigh, head in his lap. Slim fingers twist through his hair, greasy strands stroked straight.

“You like to listen, right?” Adam ventures, and without lifting his head, Nigel raises a brow. “You told me so. You like when I tell you what to do.”

“Darling -”

“So - so listen to me,” says Adam, and a small sound betrays the response it spills across Nigel’s skin. “You’re going to stay. You’re not going to run again and if you do, it’s with me. It’s us. We will run but it won’t come to that.”

Nigel raises his eyes to Adam, curved over him. His sweater is torn and his collar is bent crooked. A furrow spans his brow but a smile lifts his eyes and Adam is beautiful. Entirely fucking beautiful.

“I can’t get rid of the video but it’s too old to make any sort of news cycle, so if it leaks it will just get passed around by people who like watching that sort of thing.”

“Fucking murder?”

“Yes,” Adam shrugs. “I told you, I don’t understand people. But I’ll bury you in every other way. The listing where I found you, any other site that has your name or any aliases - you’ll have to give those to me.”

“Yes,” Nigel whispers, as Adam’s hand curls around his jaw to lift his head.

“New credit cards. New bank accounts. New passport, everything, Nigel. You’ll tell me who you owe money to -”

“Yes, darling.”

“- and how much and I’ll send them a payment for that and more,” Adam tells him. “I have the money. Too much money. They won’t be able to trace it to me but I’ll make sure they know it’s to absolve you. And then -”

“And then?”

“You disappear,” Adam says, his smile flickering wider. “And you don’t have to run anymore.”

Nigel draws his knees underneath himself, sitting up straight and tall and taking Adam’s face in his hands. There are marks around his wrists still, cut deep from the zip ties. There is blood dried brown across his face and a split across his broken nose. And he doesn’t care about any of it, not in the light of Adam’s words, his offer - no, his fucking insistence. Nigel leans to touch their brows together, swallowing hard.

“Why, Adam?”

A little laugh puffs sweetly across his cheek. “Because this is the most sense all those poems about love have ever made to me, Nigel. And I want you to stay.”

The sound Nigel makes when their kiss ensnares is one of pain. Not a sharp agony, not like getting his fucking nose broken - again - or getting shot. No, it’s the long ache that comes from using muscles without rest - too many years spent in tension, too many years of dread. He pushes his hands against Adam’s thighs and stands, kissing him back onto the bed with a groan.

Adam goes, crawling backward and pulling Nigel atop, hands in his hair and on his face, down his back to gather Nigel’s shirt between slim fingers and pull it up until Nigel ducks his head out of it.

The residual adrenaline is fading, yet their bodies make more, enough that Adam puts up resistance when he’s playfully held down in bed. Enough that Nigel can undress them both, cursing at Adam’s shoes, at his own as he tosses them across the room.

"Fucking beautiful, darling."

"I'm too tiny," Adam reminds him, squirming happily as he’s lifted and manhandled back further against the bed.

"Tiny and beautiful. Little prince. You were so brave, baby, you were so fucking brave in there."

Adam just makes a soft noise and draws his fingers down Nigel’s chest, enough to leave marks. It feels good. The praise, having Nigel near again... it feels like home. He draws his knees alongside Nigel’s hips, and slips his arms around his neck. Adam thinks back to the speed with which Nigel moved, the same strength held against him now, and he shivers.

“Now I fucking owe you,” Nigel murmurs, squinting up at Adam with a crooked grin. “You saved my ass in there, sweetheart. Saving it again now. What could a little prince want that he’s not already got, huh?”

His sucking kiss tugs a tremor through Adam, his voice taking flight high and lovely. Thin heels press down the length of Nigel’s legs. His hands curl into fists in Nigel’s hair. He pulls him back and Nigel goes, eyes hooded and purpling beneath from his broken nose.

“Stay with me,” Adam says again. “And listen when I tell you something.”

Nigel nods, a little movement, but without reservation. He will listen. He will learn what Adam likes and what Adam needs and what Adam wants; he will learn to care for Adam in all his fucking peculiarities. He will take care of him. Protect. Anticipate. Provide.

It’s the kind of job he could get used to, really. Especially as Adam pulls Nigel to his back and slinks atop him.

Kisses press warm to Nigel’s skin, fingers careful with peeling hair that sticks to the tacky blood against his face. Adam is curious, careful, utterly lovely. The bruise on his face will grow dark in a few days, then yellow, then fade, and that pain will be forgotten. And Nigel will make sure that nothing like that happens to him again.

“Tell me what you want, darling,” Nigel coaxes him, amused when Adam gives him a narrow-eyed look and denies him that for a few moments more. He is radiant, he is confident and calm and powerful, and Nigel wonders if Adam realizes that about himself.

“I want to make you feel good,” Adam tells him after a while, nosing against his neck. “I want to hear you make that sound again, when I touch you and you’re too sensitive and you shiver and tell me you like it.”

Nigel doesn’t deny him his desires. Nigel can’t deny Adam fucking anything. He grasps sweat-damp curls and bends their mouths together, blood and smoke and fading fear metallic on their tongues. He could laugh for the moment of doubt that Rhia seeded in his thoughts, that Adam doesn’t feel, can’t feel, can’t care or like or love another. Nigel knows the truth in every brush of Adam’s fingernails down his chest. He hears it in every whisper of breath against his cheek. He feels it pressed between his legs and in the twin rhythms of their hearts and every little look that Adam gives him beneath long lashes.

“I do like it,” Nigel whispers, voice curling low when Adam presses his hand between them. “I like you, little prince.”

Adam curls his palm against Nigel’s balls and pulls softly but enough to coil Nigel’s belly tight in bliss. Nigel would do anything for him. Be anything for him. Give him anything -

A laugh shakes free before Nigel can stop it, and he turns Adam’s head aside with lips against his ear. “Lower,” he grins.

“You don’t have another knife in there do you?” Adam asks, and Nigel snorts, turning warm against Adam and kissing his throat.

“No, darling, just me.”

Adam laughs, just as flushed, and gives Nigel what he wants. Slow fingers tickling up the shaft of his cock before curling down it instead. Deliberate stroking and deliberate pauses, to have Nigel hold his breath, squirm, shift, adjust against it before Adam gives him that tight pressure again.

“Lower?” Nigel asks, and Adam hums, considering, before acquiescing to that too. Both hands down, now, to push Nigel’s hips down and adjust himself over him. Then Adam curls his fingers beneath Nigel’s thigh and spreads him, watching the way the other resists only in the tension between his brows, the tautness of his muscles, before, with a sigh, he relaxes into this too.

Nigel wouldn’t call it fucking welcome, but it isn’t as bad as he imagined it might be. A single fingertip circles him, and apprehension yields to shame yields to a shiver. Maybe it is welcome. Maybe it even feels nice. He keeps his eyes on Adam, even as he drapes an arm across his eyes, cock full and heavy against his stomach and hips rocking in little movements that mirror a thrust.

Or seek one.

“Fuck,” Nigel groans, when Adam rubs a little harder. He spreads his fingers and strokes slow across tender skin, and Nigel can do no more than flex his fingers into a fist and arch limber from the bed. “Have you fucking done this before?”

“I’ve had sex.”

“With - fuck,” laughs Nigel, rumbling dismay from the pit of his belly that twists serpentine in reluctant pleasure. “With another man, Adam, have you ever fucked another man.”

Adam shakes his head, frown soft, and carefully adds another finger, enough for Nigel to groan, low and deep, and force his body to relax into this. It doesn’t hurt. This, at least, he’s done before. It’s the potential of more, more fingers, another guy’s fucking cock in him, that had always nipped that thought in the bud.

“I’ve never wanted to have sex with men before,” Adam admits, eyes up to look at Nigel through his hair, where he lies, chest lifting in deep breaths, dropping in whispered curses. He is lovely, vulnerable and open, and Adam wants nothing more than to press himself to the warm hair on his chest and tongue against a sensitive nipple.

He hasn’t forgotten a single moment of little drawn breaths and soft sighs and little encouragements, when touching Nigel. He wants to learn him by heart.

“I want to have sex with you,” Adam tells him. “Do you want to?”

Nigel sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and huffs it free again. He pushes his heels into the bed, sliding against the slick comforter. His body stretches, yielding to Adam’s fingers, but the thought of it makes him tighten again. That too feels far fucking better than it should, and when Adam splays his fingers in response, Nigel lets loose a dizzied curse before he can stop himself.

“Do you fucking want to?”

“That isn’t an answer, Nigel.”

“I don’t know if I’ll like it,” he mutters, teeth bared before another twist of fingers inside him shakes his body to loose, rocking pleasure again. “Fucking cock in my ass, it’s fucking q-”

“It’s just sex,” Adam tells him, “and if you don’t like it -”

“We’ll fucking stop?”

“We’ll fucking stop,” smiles Adam. “Do you want to? Answer just that question. Do you want to have sex with me?”

Lowering his arm from over his eyes, Nigel lets his gaze rest on Adam, perched pretty between his legs. Beyond the anticipation, beyond the dread of discomfort and questions of his own fucking inclinations that this raises, Nigel wants.

He wants Adam to feel good.

He wants Adam to have sex with him.

He wants Adam.

Period.

“Yes,” whispers Nigel, dropping his knees to the bed and spreading wide. He twists his hips in slow undulations, to feel the pressure of Adam’s fingers inside him, entirely different than when Nigel’s had a girl do it, or done it himself when he was an idiot kid. “Yes,” he says again, “but tell me, little prince -”

“I want to have sex with you,” Adam repeats, cheeks pink and bright with his own pleasure in admitting it out loud, again, to Nigel when he is like this before him. Adam bites his lip and consider a moment, before adding, “I am going to have sex with you.”

“Yes."

“It’s going to feel good, together, like that,” Adam adds, confidence spurred on by Nigel’s responses, by his sighs and soft curses, by the way his fingers curl in Adam’s hair and tug it, stroke over his throat, between his shoulders, down lower still as Adam presses close.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” Adam tells him softly.

“Of course I am,” snorts Nigel, ruffling Adam’s hair with his breath. “Too fucking stupid to die.”

Before Adam can protest, Nigel twists a kiss against the corner of his mouth. He draws the backs of his fingers along Adam’s bruised cheek, a warning rumble emanating from deep in his chest. The fuckers are gone now, all miserably alive, but Nigel’s ferocious desire to pay them back in fucking spades for hurting Adam only abates when Adam lays his hand over Nigel’s and closes it warmly against his cheek.

“I’ll stay,” Nigel whispers. “They won’t fucking come for you again, darling, and if they do, I swear to fucking Christ -”

“Nigel.”

“Baby?”

“Shut up.”

Nigel grins against Adam’s temple and holds his tongue between his teeth as Adam rocks against him. Blunt pressure pushing inward, little movements of Adam’s fingers but enough that Nigel braces, toes curling into the bedcover. Another soft thrust and Nigel curses fondly at him. He spits twice in his hand and each time shoves it between them, jerking Adam off roughly. Adam’s little sound is pleased, in his own startled way, but once slick, Nigel relents.

“Now,” he asks, arms curling around Adam and hands grasped against his shoulders. “Now, darling, please, before I -”

A firm stretch cuts Nigel’s words off with a groan that tapers to an unsteady laugh, and he rides his legs high against Adam’s hips. Adam is careful when removing his fingers and lining himself up instead. He knows this is entirely different to having sex with a woman, this will not naturally stretch, the anus is not meant to, but he has read enough to know that those who practice this particular penetration - two men, especially - find it to be wonderful.

He hopes it’s true.

He can see that Nigel is nervous, despite his big words and bigger promises. He wants him to feel good, that’s all Adam wants. So he is careful, he is so careful when he starts to push in, watching Nigel with wide eyes as he arches back as he clenches hard around Adam and pulls a sound from him.

“If it hurts we can stop,” Adam whispers, a promise, a reassurance. It feels so good - for him - already, if this is all they do that would be enough. Just holding each other on the couch will be enough.

“Adam -”

He realizes he spoke aloud, a whispered litany of promises and soft little things, and he laughs, warm, against Nigel’s chest.

“Tell me,” he asks. “Just tell me how it feels okay? I want it to feel good for you.”

Nigel grips Adam’s hair with one hand, the other sliding low along the curve of his spine, past the dimples lower still, and further. He cups Adam’s ass and squeezes just enough that he can feel the muscles move as Adam presses in, and lifts his head to watch the movement of his hips. Only when his lungs are burning does Nigel release the breath he’s holding, braced against the stretching pain, the filling heat of Adam pushing against him.

When he sighs, he relaxes, and when he relaxes, his voice tilts to a groan.

“Just like that,” Nigel whispers, touching a kiss to Adam’s shoulder. “Slow, slow - there, _fuck_ , Adam.”

“Does it feel good?”

“It hurts,” Nigel murmurs, throat clicking when he swallows, lips parted on little gasps. “I like it.”

He feels full, too full, in a way he’s never felt before, not with all the fucking or drugs or booze in which he’s partaken to satisfy the hollows inside himself. There is pain, he’d be fucking lying if he said otherwise, but pain’s never been a deterrent to Nigel, and like this? It’s a fucking pleasure.

“I’m sorry,” Adam breathes, ducking his head against Nigel too. It doesn’t hurt for him, it feels great for him, tight and hot and trembling - he can feel Nigel’s pulse against his entire body and it feels electric. It feels entirely right. Adam makes another little sound and shivers. “I’ll make it better, I’m sorry.”

He knows that the prostate is sensitive to this, that when stimulated it creates pleasure akin to finding the g-spot on a woman. He knows, and were his head not filled with the soft sounds Nigel makes, the images of how his lips part and how his throat works, Adam would be able to divert a little of his concentration to seeking it out.

He kisses against Nigel’s jaw, down under it and nuzzles there, telling him he feels wonderful, that he wishes Nigel knew how good it feels, that he will let him, too, whenever he wants, however he wants, and then he shifts, just a little deeper, just a little farther, and Nigel jerks against him with a curse that makes them both startle.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says again. “We can stop.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” laughs Nigel, his voice rough but the words genuine, entirely fucking genuine. “Just - move - fucking move a little -”

“Like this?” Adam asks, working his hips slowly back and watching, rapt, as Nigel tilts his head back into the pillow with a moan. It’s slow and it’s careful and it’s so tight that Adam has to focus not to have it be over all too soon. He finds a rhythm that pushes clipped breaths and little grunts from Nigel, deeper each time. He finds the resistance lessens when he pushes in again, but the heat and friction enough to flood his cheeks with heat.

Nigel watches the rosy blush spread beneath Adam’s eyes, black with pupil. He watches as Adam’s blush spills down his cheeks in spots of red, and drips down his throat, pinkening him all the way to his chest. He’s only a little hard, now, but reaches between them to tug at his cock, in time with the rough stretch spreading him sharp, all the way up to his spine. His other hand, Nigel pushes through Adam’s hair, to bring their mouths together.

“Harder,” Nigel asks, their lips touching but both breathing too hard to kiss. He grins when Adam smiles, and lets loose a moan. “Please, Adam - like you want to -”

“I want to like this,” Adam tells him, but he does shift a little, deeper, harder, right up against Nigel’s prostate until he’s groaning, stretching his shoulders wide, filling his chest with air, pushing up against Adam in every way he can.

It feels exquisite. 

Adam feels like he’s seeing stars.

“Nigel…” His voice shivers, eyes barely open, too far gone as his body continues to move, seeking that primal, carnal, divine sensation within Nigel. “Oh, Nigel - close, I’m really close -”

Nigel tries to think, he tries to fucking make his brain work when it’s overwhelmed by the sight of Adam atop him, the fullness of Adam inside him. With a grin, crooked, he recalls all the times that he was close to coming and was able to slow it. Pushing his hands against Adam’s chest, he turns them both, a leg snared tight to keep Adam inside him.

Nigel sits astride with a flex of his shoulders and a twist in his spine. Head bowed he moans Adam’s name and a few choice Romanian curses as he sinks back onto Adam’s cock.

“Not yet, baby,” Nigel murmurs. His fingernails leave red lines against Adam’s pale chest. “Spoiled little prince.”

Now it is Adam who moans, arching up, laughing and pressing a hand to his face as Nigel gives him this, powerful and beautiful and strangely obedient to Adam’s demands. He shifts and Adam shifts with him, slow pushes up as Nigel sinks down, sucking in his stomach when he pulls off, up on strong, trembling knees.

He is perfect. Scarred and angry and beaten but never broken.

And here, now, as Adam’s alone.

It’s grasping for control and releasing it all at once, Adam’s cock up his ass but Nigel controlling the depth and speed of it. Even after the fucking beating he took, bruised ribs and busted nose, there is still strength in him yet, flexing in slow undulations atop the gorgeous little thing beneath him.

And Adam is that, stunning beyond fucking reason. Curls stuck to his skin from sweat, a bruise on his cheek. Scarlet lips swollen from kissing and parted to let noisy little gasps pass, quickening, each time Nigel works his body down again. He takes Adam deep, buried down to the fucking base, finding a faster rhythm and just the right angle to hit that spot inside that makes Nigel’s cock fill fat and flushed and his voice crack weak.

“You feel so fucking good, Adam,” he tells him, because Adam wants to know. He needs to know. “So fucking thick in my ass, darling, are you going to -”

“Yes,” Adam gasps again, pushing his hands through the hair on Nigel’s chest. “Nigel, please -”

The older man leans low, trapping Adam’s hands between them and his cock against Adam’s stomach, bending to allow Adam to thrust quick inside him. He seeks out Adam’s ear, teasing the lobe between his teeth, and grins when he shivers.

“Come inside me, Adam,” Nigel murmurs, drunk on minibar bottles and drunk on Adam fucking Raki. “Fucking come in me, little prince.”

Adam makes a sound, a soft and helpless thing, and clings to Nigel where he can, nails gently pressing into skin as he turns his lips against Nigels and loses himself entirely within him. It’s hot and messy and unusual, and Adam shivers as Nigel breathes a curse that sounds like a prayer against him.

He wants this again.

He wants this often.

“You,” Adam whispers. “Nigel, you, now, please -”

Nigel’s lips twitch up before he grins, sucking a noisy kiss against Adam’s throat, turning his head aside to taste the bruise on Adam’s cheek with his tongue spread flat. He drops his hand between them and with the smack of skin against skin, jerks himself harder and groans. He can feel the wetness spreading lower, dripping hot against his skin and cooling outside his body. Shoving a hand against the pillow beside Adam, Nigel keeps himself from toppling against his little prince as his body begins to quake. Wrist snapping in unsteady rhythm, cock leaking against Adam’s belly, Nigel shudders again and again, a weakening groan shaken from him on every breath.

It’s when the first bead slicks wet down his leg that Nigel can’t hold back. He won’t, because Adam told him to let go. Grabbing the headboard with his free hand and shaking so hard the bed creaks, Nigel thrusts into his fist with a moan so loud there’s a bang against the wall from the next room over. He’s fucking blind from it, he’s fucking blind, eyes squeezed shut against the firework-burst behind them as he ropes thick streaks of come across Adam’s chest. He spatters his chin from the force of it, drips dollops against his belly, smearing flushed skin in shining white.

“Little prince,” Nigel gasps, before any more words are swallowed into heaving lungs.

He’s speechless.

He’s fucking speechless.

Adam is trembling beneath him, eyes wide and hands curled, lips parted. He is dirty. He hates being dirty. He is sweaty. He hates being sweaty. Yet when he reaches to tug Nigel down against him in a messy kiss, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all, because he has NIgel so close, and they are together in this, and he’s not going to go away again.

Adam makes little sounds against him, warbling and delighted, eyes closed and lips curving into a smile until he can’t hold it anymore and laughs against Nigel’s lips.

“That was really good,” he whispers, biting his lip and looking up at Nigel.

“It was,” Nigel says. And then he laughs, and then he can’t stop laughing, his whole body shaking with the rush of it all - the entire fucking night, brought to beautiful climax between them. “It was fucking great, darling. Beautiful little prince,” he grins, another laugh pulling free, “who fucks like a fucking pro.”

Adam squirms, grinning at the praise, and shakes his head. Nigel stretches his legs long to either side of Adam’s own, loosening their tie, and rolling to his side. He wraps Adam in his arms, beneath his leg. He pays no mind to his aching muscles or the curious emptiness between his legs or the mess that he can feel slicking against his ass.

“We should make a fucking sex tape,” Nigel snorts, his face sore from his smile, so wide he can hardly open his eyes for it.

Adam just watches him, eyes wide and lips parted a moment before he understands, feels the warmth of Nigels’ humor against his skin, feels the heavy limbs and slippery mess between them and allows himself to laugh too. And then he can’t stop either.

He supposes they could. It wouldn’t be hard to stream it, have it appear and disappear just as quickly, to taunt and annoy those after them, still. And if anything, it would be a nicer thing to get in the inbox in the form of blackmail than generic threats and anger.

“Maybe we should,” Adam giggles, and presses a kiss to Nigel’s throat. “Later.”


End file.
